Curtis Wilkie: President Biden should step aside to protect his country and his legacy

Curtis Wilkie is a retired journalist, author and professor who covered eight U.S. presidential campaigns and subsequent White House administrations during his storied reporting career.

President Biden should never have sought a second term.

I have an unusual perspective on this discussion dominating American politics considering I’ve known Joe Biden longer than any reporter who ever covered him. I’ve witnessed over the years how the relentless demands of the presidency have ravaged other occupants of the White House. And I share with Biden the frailties of old age that grip us both and have begun to diminish our physical and cognitive powers.

This is not a new concern of mine, produced by the president’s poor performance at last month’s debate. I reached this conclusion during a long conversation in March 2023 with two old friends who had closer political connections to Biden than my own. I felt his age and halting public appearances would make him vulnerable in 2024, increasing the possibility of Donald Trump’s return.

My friends sadly agreed. The man we remembered for his wit, admirable empathy and high energy was slipping.

My experience with Biden began in the summer of 1971 in Wilmington, Delaware. He was an ambitious 28-year-old New Castle County councilman; I was two years older, a new reporter for the local News-Journal papers. I enjoyed getting to know him. He was smart, with a touch of the smartass, brash with a fondness for F-bombs, and a cut above the average county councilman. We had both been inspired by John F. Kennedy’s promise in his inaugural address to “pass the torch” from the benign leadership of elderly leaders “to a new generation.” Implicit in Kennedy’s message was a call for activism. Biden chose politics, I chose journalism.

The next year Biden ran for a U.S. Senate seat held by an older, popular Republican incumbent. Biden’s campaign was widely thought folly, but he proved to be intellectually quick, an attractive young candidate. He won in a year Richard Nixon crushed his Democratic opposition across the country. Biden was not yet old enough to serve in the Senate; that would happen on his 30th birthday later in the month.

I was assigned to write a long piece on Biden’s political progress. I imagined it as “Young Mr. Biden Goes To Washington.” I spent a lot of time with him. He talked of his dreams. I don’t remember if he spoke about the White House but I feel confident that was his goal. One day I accompanied him on the Amtrak train to Washington. The journey took 75 minutes each way. (It would become a daily ritual for him for 36 years.) On Capitol Hill, he excitedly inspected his new home in a Senate office building and was careful to introduce himself to everyone he encountered. Otherwise, he said, “they’re going to think I’m an elevator operator,” a pet patronage job for young men on Capitol Hill.

I spoke with his wife Nelia over lunch at Wilmington’s finest restaurant, the Hotel Du Pont’s Brandywine Room, where precious works of art by Andrew Wyeth were on permanent display. I found Nelia as glamorous as the setting. She worried that life in the fast lane might disrupt their happy family — two young sons and a new daughter — and she dazzled me by volunteering that William Faulkner had been the subject of her college thesis. I began to think of the Bidens as the perfect all-American couple with an enviable future.

All of that was shattered a few days later. While Joe visited Washington again, Nelia took their children shopping for a Christmas tree and never got home. A collision involving the Bidens’ station wagon killed Nelia and their little girl and seriously injured both preschool sons. It had the impact of a death in the family for the entire state of Delaware.           

Biden was prepared to give up his hard-earned seat before he ever occupied it, but a delegation of Democratic senators assured him they would provide special assistance if he would come to Washington. In a poignant public appearance in the hospital room with his sons, Biden announced that he would try to serve in the Senate but would resign if it didn’t work. He planned to come home to Wilmington on the Amtrak every night. “Delaware can always get another senator,” he said, “but my boys can’t get another father.”  

Biden’s story had become so convulsed I never wrote the profile.

Four years later I wound up in Washington myself, covering the White House for the Boston Globe. Though we were working in the same city again I saw little of Biden. Congress was not part of my beat and Biden, who didn’t drink, went back to his sons rather than socialize in the nation’s capital at night. Despite his schedule, he developed a reputation as a rising star, laying the groundwork for eventual chairmanships for two of the most prestigious committees, Judiciary and Foreign Relations.

Along the way he also became known for his hair-trigger tongue that delivered impolitic statements and inappropriate off-the-cuff comments punctuated with blue language. He still seemed smart, but not always so wise.

Shortly after he announced in 1987 that he would run for his party’s next presidential nomination, I heard from my son, a student at Boston College. He wanted to drop out of school to work in the Biden campaign. He could do so with my blessing, I said, but warned him, “Joe’s going to implode.”

The implosion took place within weeks. In his speeches he regularly cited the words of Neil Kinnock, the British Labor Party leader, describing the valor of the working class in English coal country. One night in Iowa, Biden appropriated the story for himself. It fit his own background, growing up amid coal mining hardships in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Reporters traveling with the candidate ignored Biden’s curious remarks. They considered it unnewsworthy because he had previously been crediting Kinnock. When Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who had not been there, magnified the event days later (with the help of the staff of Michael Dukakis’ rival campaign) with a front page account of Biden’s deception, it led to new accusations of plagiarism and exaggeration. Biden dropped out of the presidential race but vowed to be back.

His skills as a politician kept his name among credible contenders for president for another 20 years. I left Washington and my sightings of Biden were largely limited to television. At the 2000 Democratic convention, I was wandering on the floor when I heard someone shouting at me. It was Biden, who wanted to tell me that he had been to the “best (expletive) party of my life” at my alma mater, in the Grove at Ole Miss. It was a glimpse of the old Joe Biden I had known in Wilmington, charming and funny.

I’ve always felt that one’s eyes can be a measure of intelligence. When they’re bright, they usually reflect active interest; when they’re dull, there’s less in the brain behind them. The last conversation I had with Biden took place in Oxford in 2007. He spoke at Square Books to promote an autobiography. To establish affinity with his audience, he mentioned that his late wife had admired Faulkner. Afterward, we talked and I recalled my own interview with Nelia 35 years earlier when she told of her fondness for the novelist. Biden’s eyes glistened with tears.

So it’s been 17 years since I’ve seen him. I never had the opportunity to address him as “Mr. President.” He will always be Joe to me. This fall I’ll be 84 and Biden will be 82. I began worrying about both of us a couple of years ago. There began to be incidents in which I failed to be able to come up with the name of someone I know well. Or a simple word will go into hiding, popping up hours later. When I go blank in a conversation I apologize, laugh and blame it on my aging brain. I’m assured it’s nothing, but I find it troubling.

I began to notice Biden had some of the same handicaps. He butchers names or can’t remember them at all. Sometimes he appears balmy. His enthusiasm seems withered.

When Biden walked onto the set of the infamous debate last month, he did so with shuffling half-steps, the gait of an old man. Meanwhile, I’m afflicted with sciatica, and its constant pain has made me lame. I’ve not been able to walk for a year and use a rolling walker to move about.

I try to be philosophical. We have been fortunate to have lived this long, but we are paying for our longevity. Most of the decisions that confront me in retirement are inconsequential. But a president faces crises every day.

As a reporter I saw relatively young men whose campaigns I covered age dramatically. Jimmy Carter was 52 when he took office; he looked haggard when he left four years later. Bill Clinton’s hair turned gray almost overnight. George W. Bush entered the White House at age 44 and departed visibly older and exhausted.

It’s become painful to watch Biden on TV trying to demonstrate that he’s still capable of weathering the pressure. During his long career, he made some hard, proper decisions that affected his future. He emerged from the tragedy of the deaths of his wife and daughter by accepting the challenge of serving in the Senate, and he bowed out of the presidential races of 1988, 2008 and 2016 gracefully and kept his honor intact for 2020. That wisdom is no longer evident.

I wish that Biden had lived up to his promise in 2020 to be a “transitional president.” He had succeeded in driving Trump from the White House. His presidency has been mostly successful and free of catastrophe. Months ago Biden could have delivered a statesmanlike speech — prepared to serve out his four-year term and ready to leave the job to a younger generation. To walk away, genuinely able to say, “Mission Accomplished.” 

Instead, his Democratic Party is faced with its worst nightmare, the distinct possibility of a sweeping victory in November for Trump and his MAGA followers. And instead of leaving a strong personal legacy, Biden may be remembered in the history of this turbulent period as a selfish man, weakened by age, who clung to his office too long.

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A note from Mississippi Today Editor-in-Chief Adam Ganucheau: Curtis Wilkie is a Mississippi Today donor and trusted adviser to several of our journalists, myself included. We invited him to author this timely opinion piece, which does not necessarily reflect the views of the newsroom.

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