I was immediately struck by the program’s compassion, simplicity, and promise. I was incredibly moved by the hard-core, often harrowing stories told by people from all different backgrounds. They had gone through their own hells, some self-inflicted. But all told stories of trauma that gave me a new sensitivity and understanding of what people were dealing with. By the time I left, I learned how to look forward to life in a way that didn’t involve needing to change the chemical equilibrium of my brain. I learned that I could fill time without a drink.
When I got home, Beau picked me up at the airport and the next day accompanied me to my first AA meeting, in Dupont Circle. It was too daunting for me to go alone.
Beau’s presence proved to be serendipitous. It was an open meeting, meaning you didn’t have to be an alcoholic to attend. Afterward, everyone stayed for coffee and the regulars introduced themselves to any newcomers. The goal was to find a sponsor as soon as possible—someone who had been through it all and could help you stay sober using the tools of AA’s twelve steps.
If I’d gone alone, there’s no doubt I would have left immediately and headed straight home. But Beau being Beau, he insisted we stay. He milled around, chatted up everybody. Before I knew it, he introduced me to Jack, who would be my sponsor for the next seven years and, for that period at least, save my life.
Politics is not the family business—service is. But politics is tied to much of that service and needs to be calculated during decisions of when to run, what to run for, and how to campaign.
One thing that was always difficult for Beau and me to game out was his political path while our dad’s career continued to rise. We were as intimately involved in what Dad did politically—Senate races, presidential runs, choosing to join the Obama ticket—as we were in mapping out his own strategy.
Beau was elected Delaware attorney general in 2006, and two years later Dad’s Senate seat opened up when he left for the Obama administration. The conventional wisdom was that the Democratic governor would appoint Beau to the seat until a special election was held two years later, at which time he’d be the front-runner.
Beau wouldn’t have it. He wanted to be viewed as his own entity and not as someone riding in on his prominent father’s coattails. The appointment went instead to Dad’s friend and longtime chief of staff Ted Kaufman. There was no one more qualified to be a United States senator than Ted, who was also one of Beau’s closest confidants and like an uncle to both of us. When the special election then came up, Beau had just returned from Iraq and didn’t want to disrupt his family even more after being gone for a year. He set his sights on becoming governor, most likely in 2016, and neither one of us planned ahead for anything more than that.
Beau and I always knew that Dad wouldn’t retire until he became president. That was the collective dream of the three of us. It was never talked about in that way, but we knew that was the trajectory.
When Dad had to decide whether to join Obama as his vice president, Beau and I privately weighed the pros and cons. My initial reaction: “You’re one of the most powerful members of the Senate, you’re chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and you can keep your own voice.” Beau’s reaction was less reflexive, more diagnostic, like that kid considering whether to leap into the quarry pond from the top of the cliff. “Turning down the nominee of your party in a historic election just isn’t done, out of protocol,” he advised. “The vice president’s job will become what you make of it.”
As always, Beau, Ashley, our mother, and I were the last in the room with Dad when he made his decision. Huddled at our parents’ house, inside Dad’s study, with its fireplace and Chesterfield couches and book-lined wall, we all agreed that Dad had both the power of persuasion and the innate loyalty needed to make that job work. We believed he would go on to become the most influential vice president ever—that is, if you discount Dick Cheney, who had the advantage of manipulating his commander in chief.
An early, up-close glimpse for us of the intensity of Dad’s new position, and his ability to adapt to it, came in November 2009.
It was a fraught time, the height of an internal White House debate about whether to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, Dad kept our family’s decades-old tradition of spending Thanksgiving week in Nantucket. Beau had returned from his year of deployment in Iraq just two months earlier. The house we stayed in became, in effect, a long-distance adjunct of the West Wing, filled and surrounded by military aides and Secret Service.
Seated in armchairs inside a wood-paneled New England den, Beau and I witnessed it all, at least during those times when classified information wasn’t exchanged: the stress of life-and-death stakes; political knife-fighting at the highest level; and the best traits of our dad in vivid, frenetic action.
It was a critical moment for him. One misstep could make his next three or seven years long and uncomfortable ones. The power that a vice president wields is whatever the president allows, and in that first year, the relationship between Dad and President Obama was not yet fully formed.
Dad was frustrated. He felt he was being outmaneuvered by players inside the White House,
