An Opinion on Joe Biden, My friend and an American Hero

Joe Biden stepped up in the breach: The tragedy that killed a man in Washington, D.C., in his 80th birthday

The President of the United States was looking towards the English Channel while on the cliffs of Normandy. It was only six weeks ago, on the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, and President Biden had just finished his remarks at the American cemetery atop Omaha Beach. Guests had been congratulating him on the speech, but he didn’t want to talk about himself. The moment was not about him, it was about the men who died there. He told me that it felt so large. “This may sound strange — and I don’t mean it to — but when I was out there, I felt the honor of it, the sanctity of it. It is a profound thing to speak over the graves of the American people. He gestured back to the war dead as he turned from the view over the beaches. “You want to do right by them, by the country.”

Here is the story I believe history will tell of Joe Biden. With American democracy in an hour of maximum danger in Donald Trump’s presidency, Mr. Biden stepped in the breach. He succeeded in preventing an authoritarian threat at home, was able to end a once-in-a-century epidemic and conduct a president worthy of the title, thanks to his work on climate and infrastructure. He respected fate, and he respected the American people, when he was at his peak in a late season in his life.

The past month has been overwhelming to live through — it can feel like a person’s mind is getting stretched and flattened by what’s happening in American politics and the world. One unbelievable event follows another, culminating in Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race.

Things have been changing so fast that no one can really make sense of the time we’re living in and what this chaos means: Are things breaking apart, or is this a difficult period that precedes more stability?

The systems that govern our lives can be fragile if we are not careful. In a decade of political violence and mass shootings, Donald Trump was almost killed by a man who died from injuries he sustained in the performance. If a 20-year-old with a gun can get this close to a presidential candidate that has been surrounded by the Secret Service and cameras, then everything in our society is tenuous. There was no firm foundation to fall back on after that shock. We are still in a month after the Supreme Court legalized the presidency to ignore criminal prosecution, and people are still figuring out how much that will affect the future of American politics.