To know anything about the lives of George Washinton and Abraham Lincoln is to know how much grief pockmarked their lives, not just militarily and politically, but personally. Nor were several of our more recent presidents immune to calamity and difficulty. But if ever was a president who has endured more tragedy on a purely personal level than Joe Biden, he does not come to mind.
The facts are well known. Biden lost his wife and baby daughter in a car crash in 1972. He lost his golden son in 2015, Beau Biden, who succumbed at age 46 to brain cancer. And his remaining son, Hunter Biden, has now been found guilty of three felony counts for lying on a federal firearms application. This, after years of extreme alcohol and drug abuse, which we now know, courtesy of the trial, wreaked havoc on many in his family, including his children. Nor is Hunter done. He is slated to stand trial again in September on a different charge, this one for violating tax laws.
Still, whatever the calamities that rained down on Joe Biden in the last half century – including his own life-threatening aneurysm on an artery wall at the base of his brain – none diminished his overweening ambition. His lifelong ambition to become president of the United States. Biden has prided himself on doing it all: being a devoted and loving husband to his wives, being a devoted and loving father to his children, being a devoted and loving grandfather to his grandchildren, while simultaneously, decade after decade after decade, serving first as United States Senator, then as vice president, and finally, as president.
Joe Biden’s ambition was so great he was not to be deterred. Not by repeated personal tragedies, nor by repeated political setbacks. Nor, even now, has the dream died. Biden is running for president a second time, at age 81, when his health is less than robust and at a moment in his life when family might be presumed to take precedence. Still, his priority remains the presidency. Biden is there for his family; he remains a steady and caring presence. But even his day has only 24 hours – which, given his fixation on his office, means his focus on his family must be finite.
Shakespeare’s tragedies – such as Hamlet, Henry V, and Julius Caesar – all have heroes with tragic flaws. In most cases they are not ordinary men. They are royalty with domains over which they preside. They are leaders with followers over whom they rule. But there is nevertheless a chink in their armor, a flaw that is not, simply, a defect. It is a flaw that is fatal, that leads ultimately to disaster, even to death.
Is Biden so afflicted? Especially in the eight years since Beau Biden passed, has Joe Biden’s unquenchable ambition been his fatal flaw? Did it cost his family – and if so, how much?
Questions like these are of course unanswerable. Who can know what would have happened within the Biden family had the patriarch not remained, even after Beau’s death, consumed by his desire to become president. To run for and then win the presidency not immediately, in 2016, but in 2020, even though his family was still demonstrably traumatized by Beau’s premature demise.
Sometimes life does imitate art. So though so far as I know Shakespeare never used the phrase “work-life balance,” it’s possible that Joe Biden’s prioritizing the first over the second, was, is, his fatal flaw. Prioritizing work over life not in his heart or even in his head – but in how he has chosen to spend his time.
In the immediate aftermath of Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict Joe Biden flew to Delaware to give his son a very public hug. But in short order, the chief executive left to resume his public duties. “I am the president,” Joe Biden said, “but I am also a dad.” Notice the sequence.