INTRODUCTION
In late September 2021, when I sat down with my brother in the White House, Washington, DC, had just experienced one of its periodic late-summer thunderstorms. Loud bursts of thunder threatened to tear open the sky before finally giving way to a gentle rain. At last, the city bathed in calm. It was hard not to see a metaphor in that. Joe and I had certainly weathered our share of storms in the past seven decades.
Since Joe was elected to the presidency in November 2020, I have been to the White House many times. I am thrilled with the majesty of what it represents—power, diplomacy, and American values. Never once, not even for a moment, have I taken that honor for granted. I will never forget what it took to get here, the millions of people who put their faith in Joe, who devoted their financial resources, time, and effort. Nor have I forgotten those we lost along our improbable, seemingly impossible journey. I still feel them with us every day, their imprint on everything we do.
On this September night, I was here again, back in the home of Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt. And now Biden. The White House’s thoughtful and professional stewards had left no detail to chance. Jill had requested that my favorite wine be chilled for my arrival. The stewards had already made sure that the specially created cookies, on which the White House pastry chef had piped “Valerie” in blue icing, awaited me in my room. Jill had gone home to Delaware earlier in the day. Joe had stayed for meetings and a speech he had to give the following afternoon.
When Joe arrived in the family residence, he and I walked into the dining room for a quiet dinner alone. We sat at a long mahogany table—Joe at its head, and me at his side. It was beautifully set with crystal, china, and the evening’s entrée: salmon in a pastry shell with a medley of vegetables.
“Damn, she makes me eat this healthy stuff all the time,” my brother said. Neither of us particularly likes salmon. But he ate it. So did I. Who were we to challenge the First Lady of the United States?
My daughter Missy stopped by later to visit with us, so the three of us moved to the living room to talk. After a few minutes, Joe, the President of the United States, excused himself to raid the refrigerator. He brought back some dessert for us—a delicious lemon pound cake with ice cream—only to go back an hour later for round two. This time, he appeared with a carton of Breyers chocolate chip ice cream that he proceeded to finish with nothing but a spoon. Our father, a stickler for table manners, undoubtedly would have commented: “Champ, put that in a bowl.”
Eventually, the conversation turned to my book. Missy asked Joe his thoughts about our lives together. He praised my decency and loyalty, but then cut to the essence of our bond: “She’s been my best friend since I was three years old,” he said.
“Everyone knows that already,” Missy reminded us. She was curious about what more we could share. We hadn’t quite come up with anything, any big moment or anecdote that offered the key to understanding how we operate.
Trying again, Missy asked if we had ever had a major disagreement over all these years. We both drew a blank. Joe and I don’t work that way. We don’t hold grudges against each other. There’s no long list of grievances, no scorecard.
The truth is, we never disagreed about much—especially on the important things. Don’t get me wrong: he could drive me up the wall. And I had no problem telling any of my brothers when I thought they were being jerks. They did the same for me on those occasions when I was in the wrong.
But those were small things. On the big things, we shared a common worldview. In various profiles of Joe over the years, I have been called “the Biden Whisperer,” and that isn’t wrong. We intuitively understand each other. We can finish each other’s sentences. With just a glance, we know what the other means. As his campaign manager, I could instantly tell whether a mailer, speech, logo, or TV ad was true to Joe or not. He needed me to do that. He trusted me to do that. Without question.
Well, except for once.
As we sat together in that spacious private living room on the second floor, flanked by grand arched windows, I reminded my brother of a tense moment many campaigns ago.
The year was 1996, and Joe was up for reelection to the Senate. I had approved a campaign ad that was running in the expensive Philadelphia media market, and someone who’d seen it complained to Joe. Joe was furious about what he’d heard, and he stormed into my campaign office with a look I’d seen before, but never directed at me—one of contained fury.
He leaned over my desk, reciting a litany of complaints about the ad. “Why the hell would you approve something like that?” he demanded.
I looked back at him. “Because it’s the best ad I’ve ever seen.”
“Why didn’t you say that in the first place?” he asked. Then he came around my desk, kissed me on the forehead, and left.
Within seconds of that explosion, the storm had subsided. He had humbly backtracked, remembering that there was no way I would do anything that I didn’t think was in his best interest.
Now, in 2021, as we relived that moment, I walked over to his chair and kissed him on the forehead.
The President of the United States leaned back. I saw the tears well up as he closed his eyes. I stayed quiet—no words were needed to explain total trust.
There we sat, filled with love and gratitude in recollecting that incident, reminded of our gift of understanding and rapid repair, grateful we were still a team.
“That’s it,” he said, his voice low. “That says it all.”
We had found the elusive memory that explained us. And then I urged my brother, the leader of the free world, to finally go off to bed.
* * *
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Maybe you’ve heard this quote before. Like a lot of resonant sayings, it’s been passed around to the point that some people don’t even know where it came from. As the legend goes, these were the great artist Michelangelo’s immortal words when asked how he could have created a masterpiece like his Angel sculpture at the Basilica of San Domenico. Whether or not that story is true, the message is powerful. We all carve and are carved. Sometimes we hold the chisel, and sometimes we are the marble.
There’s still dust on my shoulders from the many Michelangelos in my life who saw the angel, that potential, in me—my parents, my brothers, my husband, so many teachers and family members, so many good friends. And I’ve tried to pass on the gift to be a Michelangelo to others around me who’ve looked over the years for advice, guidance, or unflinching love.
My three brothers and I grew up with many advantages. I’m not talking about wealth or status—we Bidens had neither. Rather, I’m referring to things that are far more valuable and precious—our family, our upbringing, our faith. Because of these values, our parents expected us not to squander what we had been given but to be change agents, to make a difference. And that’s just what my brother Joe and I set out to be—agents of change—to share our ideas, and to invite others to engage with us on this journey toward a more just and equitable future.
Together—with me as campaign manager—we launched Joe’s first US Senate race on a platform to advance Civil Rights, end the war in Vietnam, and protect our planet. He was twenty-nine years old. I was twenty-six. We had no pedigree, no established organization behind us, and no influence. But we had passion and commitment and hope. We were too idealistic and too young to know what we shouldn’t be doing. So we made our own rules. We worked hard and scrambled—and, yes, sometimes we had small disagreements along the way. After all, it isn’t easy raising an older brother.
I was the kid sister whose brother pulled up a chair for her at a table where there had been no room for women. All the political pundits were men, all the consultants were men, and most of the reporters covering Joe’s campaign were men. They believed that a woman’s rightful place in politics was answering the phones and sending out mailers. Women didn’t manage Senate campaigns in 1972. But I did. So, sometimes I had to set the guys straight. I wasn’t dubbed “the Hurricane” by happenstance.
I went on to manage Joe’s next six Senate races and his first two campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination. For the entirety of our professional lives, we have worked side by side: he as candidate or elected official; I as advisor, surrogate, media consultant, and confidante. But more than any formal role, we have been, first and foremost, brother and sister and best friends.
In many ways, our family story is not all that unusual. We are a middle-class, Irish Catholic family whose parents worked hard to raise healthy, kind, empathetic children. We went to church, to Catholic schools, and occasionally got into childhood mischief. We were surrounded by an extended family filled with great characters. We were encouraged to always stand up for ourselves and for one another. We faced setbacks as a team, and together we celebrated one another’s victories. When Joe first decided to go into politics, politics became a family calling. That’s just the way we did things as Bidens.
My story—of being an American woman in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first—is also a familiar one. The baked-in expectations of gender roles, the balancing of work and raising children, the breaking of professional barriers, the evolution of gender-related policy—all these social and legal currents ran through my own life, at home and in the workplace.
My experiences in the political world came first at my brother’s side. But those experiences enabled me to eventually train other women to be political leaders, both in the United States and around the world, to find a seat at their own table. And the conversations and experiences I had, both on the campaign trail and in my consulting work, helped me offer my brother a deeper understanding of the challenges women face every day.
In writing all of this down, I’ve been intrigued by the vagaries of memory. I’ve consulted my own paper trail and other family members wherever I can, but there are details of my own life, it turns out, that elude even me. In reminiscing about my early days as a teacher at the same high school my younger brother Frankie attended, he surprised me by recalling that he had been in my class. “How could you not remember that?” he marveled, and we laughed. Nonetheless, I have attempted, to the best of my ability, to convey the essence of how each experience felt, and the joy of growing up Biden.
October 30, 2020
When we arrived at the Iowa State Fairgrounds for the last “Biden for President” rally, it felt as if we’d stepped into a ghost town: all the buildings vacant, the merry-go-round still, paper swirling across the empty fields and roads. It was a clear, crisp, blue-sky day, as late fall should be. COVID-19 was ravaging the country, and the bustling conviviality usually found here was a distant memory.
Over the next few hours, cars filled with supporters began to arrive. They lined up across the field, separated by rope dividers designed to create a safe distance between the vehicles while a makeshift parking lot began to take shape several hundred feet from the podium. The press pool was out in the open air—our team had cordoned off an area for them, situated on the asphalt surface closer to where Joe was to speak. Joe’s granddaughter Maisy and I sat near them while we listened to the introductions, waiting for Joe to take the stage for his final appeal to voters, just four days before the election.
While some people stepped outside or sat on their hoods, most stayed in their cars so at this event, applause was expressed by the honking of horns. The fairgrounds took on the sound of a downtown city street at rush hour: horns blaring and people shouting through their car windows. “It was a great honkin’ day” became our in-house rallying cry.
Midway through Joe’s remarks, I was distracted by members of the press who had begun whispering and were looking up and pointing to the sky. Instinctively, protectively, I thought, Why aren’t they listening to Joe? One of the local campaign staffers who worked with the press came over to me and said, “Look, Val!” Maisy and I craned our necks to see where she was gesturing. Directly above us, an eagle was circling. It passed over Joe’s head, soared back and forth a few times, and then flew off.
“Hello, Beau—thanks for stopping by,” I said aloud, and thought back to a difficult caucus day in Iowa nine months earlier. Several eagles had perched in the trees lining the road where my daughter Missy and I were campaigning that day. We felt protected under their watchful eyes and were so moved by the sight of them that we pulled over to take it in.
It had been a long and arduous journey since February 3, but we had come full circle. I felt in my heart and soul that we were heading for a smooth landing.
1
FORTY-EIGHT YEARS,
TO THE DAY
On the night of Saturday, November 7, 2020, I waited for my brother amid a sea of jubilant voters at the Chase Center on the Riverfront, in Wilmington, Delaware. Loudspeakers were blasting upbeat music and lights glittered over the Christina River. Earlier that afternoon, four days after the election had been held, the Associated Press finally called the race: Joe had won Pennsylvania, giving us an insurmountable lead over the four-year nightmare that was Donald Trump. In a few minutes, Joe would come out and declare victory to the waiting crowd of supporters—despite the fact that his opponent had not conceded (nor would he ever), and despite the fact that there were still protesters chanting “STOP THE COUNT!” outside voting facilities. The worst was yet to come, though we could not have imagined it at the time. For this one moment, at least, none of that mattered.
My husband, Jack, and I took in the scene. Like the rest of the family, we were stationed in one of the Jeep Wranglers that the campaign had secured for the event. Jack was in the driver’s seat; I was standing up on the passenger’s seat, head and arms poking through the open sunroof. Looking around at the countless smiling eyes shining above BIDEN–HARRIS face masks, I felt a wave of gratitude and affection. These people knew Joe—had known Joe—for decades, ever since his first campaign for public office, a County Council race in 1970. Having been his campaign manager for that race and having run every Senate campaign and two presidential campaigns since, I knew them just as they knew Joe. They were our friends, our neighbors, our people—the people who’d brought Joe “to the dance,” as he would say in his speech a few moments later.
We were just a five-minute drive from the Hotel Du Pont, the place where we had launched Joe’s first Senate campaign in 1972. At the time, I was a twenty-six-year-old high school teacher; Joe was a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer.
That year, we campaigned in supermarket parking lots and snapped Polaroids with shopkeepers. I recruited my students to knock on doors and drop campaign literature throughout the state. We hit every small-town parade, block party, and parish festival from the day school let out for the summer to Election Day in November. The press called us “the Children’s Crusade,” because we did everything with throngs of middle and high school students—a combination of Joe’s vision and the encouragement of their eighth-grade and social studies teachers (Joe’s wife, Neilia, and I).
The Democratic Party saw us as sacrificial lambs—no one thought we had a chance in hell of winning the seat; others saw us as a nuisance. Our opponents didn’t see us at all. I was flying by the seat of my pants—I hadn’t the slightest clue what I was supposed to be doing. That didn’t stop me, though. We were as scrappy as we were inexperienced.
When Joe won, by an astoundingly slim margin of 3,163 votes, he became the first US Senator either of us had ever known. And on top of that, he became one of the youngest Senators ever. On election day, he was too young even to be sworn in; he had to wait until November 20, his thirtieth birthday.
Copyright © 2022 by Valerie Biden Owens
