Olivia: Alright Jackson, before we dive in, give me your one-sentence, brutally honest impression of a political memoir. Jackson: Oh, that's easy. It's a 400-page victory lap, carefully airbrushed to look like a humble journey of self-discovery. Am I close? Olivia: You're not wrong, usually. But today's book might just break that mold, or at least, it gives us a fascinating look at the man before the myth. Jackson: I'm intrigued. Which one are we tackling? Olivia: We're talking about Joe Biden's 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics. Jackson: 2007, so this is before he's Vice President, before he's President. This is Senator Biden looking back on his career. That’s a very different lens. Olivia: Exactly. And what makes it so compelling, and at times so raw, is that it was written as a reflection on a 35-year Senate career. It’s the story of a man whose entire political identity was forged by an almost unimaginable personal tragedy that struck him right at the very start of that career. Jackson: So this isn't just about policy and politics. It’s about the person behind them. Olivia: It’s about how the person and the politician become inseparable. The core lesson, the one that echoes through every chapter, comes directly from his father. It’s this idea that the art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down. Jackson: A classic American sentiment. But does it hold up under the weight of real life? Olivia: Well, that's the question. And for Biden, that wasn't just a platitude. It became a brutal, daily reality.

Olivia: To understand the man, you have to go back to 1972. Biden is just 29 years old. He's just pulled off a stunning upset, winning a Senate seat in Delaware against a popular incumbent. He's on top of the world, this young, ambitious, charismatic guy with a beautiful family. He’s in Washington D.C., interviewing staff for his new Senate office. Jackson: The dream scenario for any aspiring politician. The beginning of the story. Olivia: And then the story shatters. He gets a phone call from his brother, Jimmy. His wife, Neilia, and their three young children have been in a car accident while out Christmas shopping. The book describes this moment with chilling clarity. Biden writes that even before he was told the details, he just knew. He says to his sister on the phone, "She’s dead, isn’t she?" Jackson: Wow. I can't even imagine receiving that phone call. To win the biggest race of your life and then, in an instant, lose everything. His wife Neilia and their one-year-old daughter, Naomi, were killed. His two young sons, Beau and Hunter, were critically injured. Olivia: It's just gut-wrenching. He describes this feeling of being cheated, of God playing a horrible trick on him. He's filled with a rage that's so profound, he admits he understood how people could contemplate violence. He didn't want to live, let alone serve in the Senate. He told the Senate leadership he wasn't going to take his seat. Jackson: That makes perfect sense. How does someone even begin to function, let alone serve in the Senate, after that? It seems impossible. What does the book say about that immediate aftermath? Olivia: This is where that theme of "getting up" becomes more than a motto. It becomes a lifeline thrown to him by others. The Senate Majority Leader at the time, Mike Mansfield, a stoic man from Montana, refused to take no for an answer. He started calling Biden at the hospital every single day. Jackson: What did he say? "You have to do this for your country"? That would ring so hollow at a time like that. Olivia: No, it was much more personal and persistent than that. Mansfield didn't lecture him. He just kept calling, and he kept saying, "Give me six months, Joe. Just give me six months." He argued that Neilia had worked so hard to get him there, and that he owed it to her to at least try. Other senators, like Hubert Humphrey and Ted Kennedy, who knew tragedy themselves, also reached out constantly. Jackson: So it was the institution, the Senate itself, that was pulling him back in. Not for political reasons, but on a human level. Olivia: Exactly. It was this community of colleagues, many of whom he barely knew, who refused to let him go. And so, he made a promise. He agreed to serve for six months. He was sworn into the U.S. Senate right there in the hospital, standing between the beds of his two surviving sons. The photo is iconic and heartbreaking. He was a man literally torn between his private grief and his public duty. Jackson: That image says it all. And that decision to commute back and forth from Delaware to D.C. every single day on the train, that started then, right? Olivia: Yes, that famous Amtrak commute began as a promise to his boys. He needed to be there to put them to bed at night and be there when they woke up. It wasn't a political gimmick; it was a father's necessity. This experience, this crucible of loss and resilience, becomes the bedrock of his political identity. It’s the source of the empathy he’s known for, but it’s also the source of this relentless drive to just keep moving forward.

Jackson: Okay, so that resilience becomes his brand, his superpower. It’s an incredibly powerful and authentic origin story. But a superpower is only as good as how you use it. The book is called Promises to Keep. Let's talk about how he handles those promises in the political battlefield. The Robert Bork confirmation hearings feel like a major test. Olivia: A massive test. And the timing is crucial. This is 1987. Biden's first presidential campaign, for the 1988 election, has just completely imploded. He's been forced to withdraw amid a scandal over plagiarism, specifically for using lines from a British politician's speech without attribution. His credibility is at an all-time low. The media is portraying him as a show horse, not a workhorse—all style, no substance. Jackson: So he's been knocked down again, and in a very public, very humiliating way. Olivia: Precisely. And right at that moment of professional crisis, President Reagan nominates Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork is an intellectual giant of the conservative legal movement, and his confirmation seems almost inevitable. And who is the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, tasked with running the hearings? Joe Biden. Jackson: Wow. So this is his 'get up' moment on a national stage. After being knocked down by the campaign failure, he has to lead this massive intellectual and political fight. It's a redemption arc. Olivia: It is. And he makes a very strategic decision. He knows he can't win by attacking Bork's character or qualifications—they were seen as unimpeachable. So, he decides to make the hearings about Bork's judicial philosophy. He argues that the Senate has a right, even a duty, to examine a nominee's ideology and what it would mean for the country. Jackson: That sounds reasonable now, but wasn't that a pretty radical idea at the time? Olivia: It was. As the book puts it, ideology was the "third rail" of nominations. You just didn't touch it. But Biden reframed the debate. He focused on one key area: the right to privacy. Bork had famously criticized the landmark Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, which established a constitutional right to privacy for married couples using contraception. Jackson: A pretty abstract legal point for most people. How do you make that resonate? Olivia: This is where it gets brilliant. The book tells a great story about how Biden and his team were trying to figure out how to make this tangible. Biden suggests they go to a local shopping mall and just ask people a simple question: "Do you think the government has the right to tell you whether you can use birth control in your own bedroom?" Jackson: And of course, everyone says no. Olivia: Exactly. And when they asked why, people would say, "It's in the Constitution." Even though the word 'privacy' isn't explicitly there, people felt it was a fundamental American right. Biden realized that was the key. He could show that Bork's narrow, "originalist" view of the Constitution was completely out of step with the values of mainstream America. The hearings became a national seminar on the Constitution, and Biden was the professor. Jackson: So he successfully shifted the entire debate from Bork's resume to the real-world consequences of his ideas. Olivia: He did. And he was widely praised for it, even by his opponents. The book notes that his handling of the hearings was seen as fair, substantive, and intellectually rigorous. Bork's nomination was defeated, and for Biden, it was a moment of profound personal and professional vindication. He had gotten back up, and in doing so, reshaped the way the nation thinks about Supreme Court confirmations.

Jackson: But this is where some critics have a problem with the memoir. They say he's great at telling these stories of triumph, but that he doesn't always fully own his mistakes. The Iraq War vote is the elephant in the room. How does he handle that 'promise' to use his decades of foreign policy experience wisely? Olivia: That's a central tension in the latter part of the book, and he dedicates a whole chapter to it titled "My Mistake." He recounts the lead-up to the 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq. He was the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee at the time, and he was deeply skeptical of the Bush administration's case for war. Jackson: He held hearings, right? I remember he brought in a lot of experts who cast doubt on the administration's claims. Olivia: He did. The hearings raised serious questions about the lack of evidence for WMDs, the potential costs of invasion and reconstruction, and the lack of international support. He was worried that the administration, particularly figures like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, were determined to go to war no matter what. Jackson: So why on earth did he vote to give them the authority to do it? Olivia: His explanation in the book is that he saw the vote as a tool for diplomacy, not a declaration of war. He believed that giving President Bush the authority would strengthen Secretary of State Colin Powell's hand at the United Nations. The idea was that a credible threat of force would make it easier to get UN inspectors back into Iraq and potentially avoid a war altogether. He writes that he trusted Powell to manage the diplomacy and Bush to be more prudent. Jackson: Is that a real justification or a rationalization after the fact? It feels like a classic political two-step. Does he express genuine regret in the book, or is it more of a 'my mistake was trusting others' kind of regret? Olivia: It's complex, and that's where the reader has to judge. He writes, "I had underestimated the influence of the neoconservatives and the fervor of their beliefs." He expresses deep disappointment and frustration with how the administration used the authority he and others gave them. He calls the vote a mistake, but the mistake he identifies is one of misjudgment about the intentions of the Bush administration, not necessarily a mistake in his own core principles. Jackson: So the promise he broke, in his telling, was a promise to himself to be a better judge of character. It's a very personal framing of a massive geopolitical decision. Olivia: It is. And it fits the overall theme of the book. For Biden, politics always seems to come back to personal honor, trust, and relationships—the lessons he learned from his grandpop's kitchen table in Scranton, which he describes in the prologue. His vote on Iraq, in his view, was a failure of that personal judgment, a misreading of the men he was dealing with.

Olivia: When you step back, you have these two monumental moments in his Senate career. The Bork hearings, where his principles and resilience lead to what he sees as a historic victory for constitutional rights. And then the Iraq vote, where his trust in the system and in individuals leads to what he calls his biggest mistake in public life. Jackson: It really shows the two sides of that "get up" philosophy. Getting up after being knocked down is one thing, but you also have to make sure you're getting up and walking in the right direction. Olivia: Exactly. The book's real 'promise,' then, isn't about a checklist of policy wins. It seems to be about the promise to keep engaging, to keep trusting in the potential of the political system, and to keep getting up and trying to make it work, even after it fails you or you fail it. It’s a refusal to become cynical. Jackson: Which is a powerful message. But it also makes you wonder. Is resilience in a leader a guarantee of good judgment, or is it just a guarantee that they'll survive their bad judgments? The book doesn't give an easy answer to that. Olivia: It's a powerful question, and one that I think stays with you long after you finish the book. We'd love to hear what you think. Does personal resilience make for a better leader? Find us on our socials and let's discuss. Jackson: It’s a debate worth having. This is Aibrary, signing off.