Promise Me, Dad

Joe Biden's memoir recounts the most difficult year of his life, from November 2014 to the end of 2015, as he balanced his duties as vice president with his eldest son Beau's battle against terminal brain cancer and his deliberations about running for president. The book interweaves three threads: the family crisis, Biden's foreign policy work, and the question of a 2016 presidential campaign.

The narrative opens as Biden and his wife, Jill, a longtime educator, departed Washington, D.C., for the family's annual Thanksgiving trip to Nantucket, a tradition dating to 1975, when Biden was raising Beau and Hunter alone after the car accident that killed his first wife, Neilia. On Nantucket, Biden watched Beau, 45 and Delaware's attorney general, struggle to climb the stairs of Air Force Two, the vice president's plane, though Beau insisted he was fine and told Biden never to look sad in front of anyone. The family discovered that a beloved saltbox house marked FOREVER WILD had been swept into the Atlantic by erosion. Beau and Hunter urged Biden to run for president, with Beau calling it his father's duty. Biden recorded in his diary: "I pray we have another year together in 2015. Beau. Beau. Beau. Beau."

Biden recounts the discovery of Beau's brain tumor in the summer of 2013. After years of unexplained symptoms, including a stroke-like episode in 2010, a scan revealed a brain lesion. At M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Dr. Raymond Sawaya performed an awake craniotomy, a surgery done with the patient conscious to preserve brain function, removing a tumor slightly larger than a golf ball, but lab results confirmed stage IV glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, with mutations that accelerated growth. The median survival time was 12 to 14 months. Neuro-oncologist Dr. W. K. Alfred Yung, himself a cancer survivor, told Beau to live as if he had a future: "Have a purpose." This became Biden's guiding principle. He instructed his chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti, to keep his schedule packed so work could anchor him through the crisis.

In late December 2014, Biden represented President Obama at the funeral of New York City Police Department (NYPD) Officer Rafael Ramos, one of two officers assassinated in Brooklyn amid tensions between police and the Black community following the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed African American man. Biden eulogized Ramos, then visited the family of the other slain officer, Wenjian Liu, a newlywed and only child of Chinese immigrants. He shared grief counseling with Liu's widow, drawing on his own experience of loss. Liu's father, Wei Tang Liu, held Biden in a prolonged embrace on the sidewalk, a wordless exchange between two grieving fathers.

Biden describes his relationship with President Obama, built on weekly private lunches over nearly seven years. Obama delegated major responsibilities, including Iraq, Ukraine, and the Northern Triangle crisis (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador). At a January 2015 lunch, Obama subtly discouraged Biden from running, believing Hillary Clinton would win the nomination and worrying a contested primary would weaken the party. Obama said, "If I could appoint anyone to be president for the next eight years, it would be you, Joe," but urged a methodical approach. Clinton soon told Biden she planned to run; Biden said he was not ready to decide.

Through the winter and spring of 2015, Biden managed escalating foreign crises. At the Munich Security Conference in February, he delivered a forceful speech defending Ukrainian sovereignty against Russian aggression, calling for "inviolate borders, no spheres of influence, the sovereign right to choose your own alliances," and pushed back against German chancellor Angela Merkel's reluctance to arm Ukraine. Biden also took his granddaughter Finnegan to the Dachau concentration camp, telling her, "Silence is complicity." In March, he traveled to Guatemala City and secured a joint statement from the three Northern Triangle presidents pledging reforms in exchange for a billion-dollar U.S. aid package.

Meanwhile, Biden's political strategist Mike Donilon presented a memo arguing Biden was the strongest candidate to champion the struggling middle class. At a meeting to discuss the campaign, Biden noted Beau's visible deterioration: his gauntness, his leg brace, his worsening aphasia, a language impairment that forced him to whisper to Hunter, who spoke on his behalf. Biden recognized that all five men in the room were sustaining a shared fiction that gave Beau hope. Afterward, Hunter told Biden that Beau's greatest fear was that they would both give up: "It has to be you, Dad."

New scans revealed rapid tumor growth. Doctors planned a three-pronged experimental treatment: surgery, injection of a live virus called Delta-24 designed to destroy cancer cells, and an immunotherapy drug called pembro to help Beau's immune system recognize the tumor. Surgery went well in late March, and the virus injection followed in early April. Simultaneously, Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi sought U.S. help in the battle for Tikrit against ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). Biden set conditions requiring Abadi to take command and sideline Iranian-backed militias. Abadi complied, and Iraqi forces liberated Tikrit on April 1.

Early results showed promising tumor destruction, but Beau collapsed at home and was hospitalized under an alias to protect his privacy. Virus-induced swelling damaged his brain, and complications followed: peritonitis, an abdominal inflammation from a dislodged feeding tube; a tracheostomy, a surgical breathing tube; and pneumonia. Biden visited daily. When ISIL captured Ramadi in mid-May, Biden took Abadi's call from a room near Beau's at Walter Reed, feeling resentment for the first time at having to divert focus from his son. Beau briefly improved but then deteriorated. On May 29, doctors told the family: "He will not recover." Beau died the next evening, surrounded by his family. Hunter placed his hand over his brother's heart as it stopped.

Hunter planned three days of ceremonies, arranging military honors and a performance by Coldplay's Chris Martin. Obama delivered the main eulogy. Hunter recounted his earliest memory of lying beside Beau in a hospital bed after the 1972 accident, Beau repeating "I love you" over and over. At the public wake, Wei Tang Liu arrived after a three-hour drive to give Biden a wordless hug.

Biden returned to work but struggled through the summer. His inner circle built a presidential campaign centered on middle-class renewal, rejection of super PAC money (funds from outside groups with no spending limits), and a proposed Cancer Moonshot, a national cancer-research initiative. Biden's poll numbers rose, but he could not maintain composure when Beau came up in public. At a final meeting on October 20, Donilon looked at Biden and said, "I don't think you should do this," speaking as a friend. Biden decided that night. The next day, he announced in the Rose Garden, with Jill and Obama at his side, that the grieving process "doesn't respect or much care about things like filing deadlines or debates and primaries and caucuses."

In the epilogue, Biden describes his December 2015 speech to the Ukrainian parliament urging anticorruption reform. Congress approved $750 million for the Northern Triangle, and Iraqi forces retook Ramadi. At the 2016 State of the Union, Obama placed Biden in charge of the Cancer Moonshot. In an afterword, Biden recounts visiting Senator John McCain, who was fighting the same glioblastoma, and returns to the words that give the book its title: Beau's request from the fall before his death that Biden promise to be all right. Biden concludes that Beau was not merely asking him to survive but insisting he stay engaged in public life and live with purpose.