ATLANTA (AP) — As presidential memoirs go, Joe Biden’s is a relatively brief 480 pages. But Biden’s effort, set for a Tuesday release, serves the genre’s usual purpose of providing an unapologetic defense of his time in the White House.
Biden pulls no punches on Donald Trump, blasting him for his election denialism, his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and blanket pardons of the participants.
He also boasts about his lengthy legislative record
and rejects criticisms that his policies intensified inflation and complicated the nation’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
He stands by the deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and credits himself with rehabilitating U.S. international alliances that grew strained under Trump.
Biden also defends running for a second term in 2024 despite concerns about his age, even if that decision presaged Trump's second presidency.
Here are some highlights of how Biden depicts his White House years in “Promise Me, America,” including what the former president doesn’t say.
Biden makes no apologies for seeking a second term, and he complains that “the press and pundits kept talking about how weak I was” despite no challenger emerging.
“The primaries sent no warning signs that I was in trouble,” he writes. “But that couldn’t derail the narrative setting in on my candidacy. That I was too old. That I was declining mentally.”
And then came one disastrous night on the debate stage in Atlanta.
Biden writes that he’d questioned his team about the need to debate Trump at all.
“It’s not that I was concerned about my ability to debate Donald Trump,” he says. “It was that he was so prone to lying with abandon, bullying the moderators, violating the rules, whining about even a hint of fact checking, that I didn’t know whether there would be any value in my giving a public platform to this behavior.”
But Biden does lament in detail “one of the lowest moments for me” when he gave a nonsensical answer when discussing the deficit.
“I lost my train of thought, saw that my time was running out on the clock, and rushed the final part of my answer by blurting out: ‘We finally beat Medicare,’” he recalls. “What I meant to say was, ‘We finally beat Big Pharma.’”
That’s a reference to a deal negotiating drug prices for Medicare recipients, “a historic achievement,” Biden writes.
“Ironically, this historic achievement wouldn’t lift my candidacy. It would help to sink it,” he writes. “What should have been a highlight of the debate became Exhibit A that I was too old to do the job.”
Biden insists the race was still winnable even after the debate.
“Was I old? Yes. Was I able to do the job? Yes. Were voters angry about inflation? Yes. Were they angry about immigration? Yes. All tough problems. But not insurmountable ones,” he wrote, adding that it was “personally hard to take so many old friends turning on me.”
However, Biden recalls Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer telling him “I might still have five Democratic senators still supporting me.”
He told Schumer “he had a lot of gumption (I may have said it differently at the time), coming to my home and telling me to get out of the race.”
He went to sleep on the night of July 20 having worked on a draft statement announcing his decision to drop out.
“Believe it or not,” he writes, “I slept well that night.”
Biden’s election and his fate as a one-term president is tied inextricably to Kamala Harris. Although she was among the Democrats who “took their shots at me” during the 2020 primary, Biden recalls being impressed by her.
Biden often mentions Harris among the small group of advisers in the room for seminal moments and decisions, and he describes their relationship as warm. He praised her performance after she replaced him on the 2024 ballot.
Harris “was a first-rate candidate,” Biden writes of her 107-day campaign. “She performed masterfully in her debate with President Trump. She was great on the stump. She was a fundraising machine. I was proud of her and the campaign she ran.”
Biden said his hopes for permanent peace in the Middle East were “shattered” with Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
When the war began, Biden writes, he called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu several times that day. “I wanted him to know my determination to ensure that a day like this would never happen again,” Biden writes, while saying his approach was influenced by Netanyahu’s domestic politics and increasing right-wing posture.
“He and I could be direct with each other, but there wasn’t a ton of trust,” Biden writes.
He also defends providing assistance to Israel even though it became deeply controversial among Democrats. Biden explains that he believed he had to “support America’s interests and America’s allies” as president but says, “since Netanyahu’s return to power at the end of 2022, I felt that the work of protecting Israel meant protecting it both from its enemies and itself.”
Biden devotes an entire chapter to Afghanistan, framing himself as a longtime skeptic of the war, including as Barack Obama's vice president.
Trump had previously committed to withdrawing American forces, and Biden says it was an “odd predicament” — an agreement for the Taliban not to strike U.S. forces as they pulled out by a deadline. Biden described it as a “ticking time bomb.”
The details were not what “I would have negotiated” but Biden agreed “it was time to end the forever war.” So, he set a Sept. 11 deadline and, he writes, worked to shore up President Ashraf Ghani’s forces to defend themselves against the Taliban. Yet over the course of August 2021 “the Afghan army simply melted away."
During the withdrawal, a suicide bomber struck at Kabul airport's Abbey Gate. Scores of Afghan civilians died, as well as 13 U.S. service members.
“It was devastating,” Biden writes. “I think about them, and their heroism and their families, every day.”
Biden says his ambitious “American Rescue Plan,” a $1.9 trillion response to the pandemic, was necessary to jolt the economy.
But he had to navigate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who’d become a key swing vote in an evenly split Senate. Biden described calling Manchin to the Oval Office as the senator held out on the bill.
“We were both Catholic politicians from the old school. Proud. Stubborn,” Biden writes of Manchin. “I never considered myself a Lyndon Johnson–type president, who cajoled and threatened and even physically cowed legislators, but I was losing my temper. I told Joe that I needed him on this, and if he screwed me, I’d go to every county in West Virginia and tell them that Joe Manchin was why they weren’t getting any help. Joe came right back at me, reminding me that I wasn’t so popular in West Virginia.”
Manchin voted yes and the measure passed.
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Barrow is a national politics reporter who covered Biden's 2020 presidential campaign.
