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The last time Joe Biden published a memoir, called “Promise Me, Dad,” nine years ago, he ended up getting his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, in a certain amount of trouble. Zwonitzer had recorded interviews he conducted with Biden, including one in February, 2017, at Biden’s rental home in Virginia, in which the then former Vice-President told him, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs!” That recording would eventually become public because more classified stuff would later be found at a University of Pennsylvania office that Biden used, and then still more at his Delaware home, leading to the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Hur, in 2023. Zwonitzer was subpoenaed, had his computer taken, faced the prospect of criminal charges, and was referred by House Republicans for contempt of Congress. Years of litigation ensued.
Zwonitzer, who also worked with Biden on a 2007 memoir, “Promises to Keep,” is not mentioned in the former President’s latest offering, “Promise Me, America,” which is out next week. (Judging from the acknowledgments, Biden relied on a number of people this time, among them Ted Widmer, a historian whose recent work includes a volume on the Declaration of Independence and an oral history of the band Wings.) Biden gives an account of the classified-documents investigation that focusses, instead, on his rage at Hur, who wrote, in his final report on the case, that the President came across, in his interview with the special counsel, as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden calls this “extraneous commentary” and a “gratuitous hit.” It was neither. Biden’s forgetfulness was a reason that Hur cited for not prosecuting the President: if a jury believed that Biden had honestly forgotten about the classified documents, it would have been hard to get a conviction.
By any reckoning, the question of Biden’s general competency during his Presidency is a crucial one; doubts about his fitness ended his campaign for reëlection, after all. But “Promise Me, America” treats all such inquiries as extraneous and gratuitous, not just Hur’s. Biden allows that his June, 2024, debate with Donald Trump (who had his own issues with classified documents) had “gone badly” but adds that “debates had gone badly for lots of incumbent Presidents.” He sees no qualitative distinction between his frightening and heartbreaking lack of focus that night and Barack Obama’s subpar performance against Mitt Romney, or George W. Bush being “caught with a scowling face” in his debate with John Kerry: “The difference was that every other president was given the chance to redeem themselves in a second debate.” Biden continues to find it unfair that he was not afforded that opportunity. He blames “the narrative” and disloyal Democrats for the fact that he had to drop out, which he did three and a half weeks after the debate. “I wasn’t living in a dream world,” he writes. “I believed I was the best person to lead the world.”
Incredibly, Biden sticks to that position, even though, in May, 2025, when his second term would have barely been under way, he announced that he had been diagnosed with Stage IV prostate cancer. The disease had metastasized to his bones and, based on what is known as its Gleason score of nine, was fast-moving. His doctors, it emerged, had stuck to the general practice of not routinely screening men older than seventy. (Biden turned eighty in 2022.) In his memoir, Biden answers the question of whether this was wise when the patient was the Commander-in-Chief with a resounding “maybe.” He adds that he was surprised that people were “cynical” enough to think that he might not have been honest about his health. (In February, 2024, three weeks after the Hur report, that same medical team declared him “healthy, active, robust” and “fit for duty.”) It took an interview with People magazine this week to wrest from him the concession that, had he known he had advanced cancer, he wouldn’t have run. “But that wasn’t the case,” he said, still insisting that on “an objective basis” he was the right man for the job. The People interview has been his only one tied to the release of the memoir; in an X post, he said that there wouldn’t be a traditional press tour because the cancer treatment sometimes “slows me down.”
The news of the memoir, in short, is that there is no real news: Biden is as stubbornly in denial as ever. And that assessment risks making the book sound more interesting than it is. Apart from the few, frustrating stretches on his reëlection decision (from which one would never know that he had once referred to himself as “a bridge,” a phrase widely understood to mean that he would serve only a single term), most of “Promise Me, America” is startlingly dull. Much of it has the feel of something written by a committee—and a committee of which Biden himself need not have been a member. Even the headline-making detail, from an early excerpt, in The Atlantic, that on entering the White House in January, 2021, Biden found a note from Trump that was more friendly and circumspect than one would expect from a man who had been trying to overturn the election—“I know how much you love the American people”—is of marginal interest, and really about Trump, not Biden. The advance Biden received for the book was reportedly about ten million dollars.
There are whole pages that read as if someone simply sat down with Biden’s public schedule and speeches and patched them together with a few judicious additions of the first person (“As I said in my welcoming remarks . . .”) and references to America’s past (Lincoln, the gold rush, D Day). A description of a meeting in the Situation Room includes the names and job titles of a dozen people, followed by nothing much illuminating about how they may have interacted or clashed, or about how power in the White House actually worked. Some attendance lists are compelling in themselves, such as the log of phone calls that Biden made in the hours after he dropped out. (Bill Clinton is on it; Obama is not.) But when intimate details about encounters with senators or world leaders do appear, they too often have footnotes that lead to contemporary press coverage or public statements. The source listed for Angela Merkel’s blunt criticism of Trump, for example, is a Guardian article about her memoir. Instead of any real introspection, we get cliché. After a mention of threats posed by China and Russia: “Given these choppy waters, I was glad to be steering the ship of state.”
One of the themes of Biden’s memoir is that he was a fantastic President. To hear him tell it, as his term was coming to an end, things were going great all around. The global economy was “humming,” inflation in the U.S. was falling, we’d “completely rebuilt NATO” and “reclaimed the American advantage over China,” carbon emissions were poised to plunge, and the A.I. companies had meekly fallen in line with his call for them to be more responsible actors. And there were real successes. It would be a far better book if he acknowledged some failure other than not retaining the loyalty of Democratic leaders.
For example, as part of his claim to have beaten COVID, he writes that it took him just four months, until May, 2021, to go “from fewer than half of America’s schools being open to 99 percent.” If that number is news to many parents, it is because Biden seems to be defining “open” as a school where a child showed up at some point, rather than consistently or full time, and ignoring reclosures in the wake of the Omicron variant. (An earlier book, Franklin Foer’s “The Last Politician,” explored the role Joe Biden’s relationship with teachers’ unions played in the struggle to reopen schools, for better or worse.)
There is similar sleight of hand in his discussion of immigration. Biden boasts of a dramatic fall in “encounters with undocumented migrants” at the border between January, 2021, and January, 2025. At the same time, the Biden years did see a historic wave of immigration, and the memoir offers little insight into how it was managed. For example, he does not mention his Administration’s concurrent extension or renewal of Temporary Protected Status to more than a million people, and of humanitarian parole to hundreds of thousands more, many of whom were fleeing terrible circumstances. Those migrants were documented, but, because T.P.S. grants and parole are executive-branch actions, Biden also left them vulnerable to having their status stripped away by the next Administration—which it promptly began doing, as Trump turned migrants into targets.
“Yes, people could point to moments when I mixed up names or lost my train of thought or had a weak voice or walked slowly,” Biden writes. “But they could never point to something presidential that I failed to do.” A few pages later, he points to one. It is the spring of 2024, several months after Hamas brutally murdered civilians in Israel, including at a music festival, taking many of the survivors hostage, and Biden has repeatedly spoken to Benjamin Netanyahu to express his “concerns” about the Israeli military response, and what “rising casualties were doing to Israel’s image.” To his dismay, he writes, “Bibi had no qualms about making promises he had no power—or intention—to keep.” Be that as it may, it also appears that the promises Netanyahu made—to act with restraint, to protect civilians—were ones that Biden no longer had the strength or resolve to enforce. The combination of an ever-mendacious Netanyahu and an increasingly diminished Biden was a disastrous one. In many situations, a good team of staff members can act on behalf of a President, but there are moments when a President is required to impose his or her will, as only a President can. That moment came for Biden after October 7th, and he missed it.
Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, published her own memoir earlier this year. To read them side by side is to be reminded that there is more than one way of being avoidant. Jill padded her book with details about the White House’s floral arrangements; Joe does so with a six-page list of laws he signed, including the CHIPS and Science Act and the Working Dog Health and Welfare Act. The Biden Administration did accomplish a great deal—the legislation passed, the trillions of dollars spent—but it could be notably lacking in transparency, and the President’s memoir doesn’t much help. He speaks more kindly of his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, than Jill does, for example, but without giving a real sense of her influence or why he thought that she would be ready to step in for him, either when he chose her as his running mate or when he endorsed her, twenty-seven minutes after he withdrew from the race.
Where the Jill and Joe memoirs converge is in their repeated, deeply felt invocations of Biden’s older son, Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015. (Both Bidens also view the younger, troubled Biden son, Hunter, as a martyr-like target of partisan attacks; neither expresses regret for Joe’s decision to grant him, along with other relatives and allies, a broad pardon before leaving office.) Beau’s appearances are the most Bidenesque part of “Promise Me, America,” and the places where Biden’s own mark is most clear. The promise in “Promise Me, Dad,” the 2017 memoir, was Beau’s request that Joe not be so undone by his death that he withdrew from politics.
Beau is also part of Biden’s explanation for his enduring anger at Robert Hur, who said in his report that Biden didn’t know what year it was that Beau died. In his memoir, Biden calls this claim “outrageous,” adding, “if Robert Hur wants to know when my son died, here’s my answer: Today. I wake up every day feeling like I just lost him a minute ago.” But the transcript of their interview shows that Hur was correct. The Hur report matters because, in retrospect, it offered Democrats an opening to replace Biden on the ticket, at a time when only four states had held primaries, and Super Tuesday was still a month away, making it less likely that a decent President would be replaced by an awful one. But it matters in assessing Biden’s memoir, too.
Throughout his career, Biden’s signature rhetorical subject has been how a person pushes on in the face of grief and mourning. As a young man, he lost his first wife and his baby daughter in a car crash. He had it in him to write a great book about the loss of his own powers as he aged, and how it led him to lash out at people like Hur, who said what they saw, and at allies who loved him but knew that he was done. He might have found a way to be grateful for a debate that, aberration or not, insured that he wouldn’t take the oath of office with an undiagnosed case of cancer, and regretful that he didn’t depart the stage even sooner. That this memoir is not that book is a literary as well as a political tragedy. The one thing Biden doesn’t know how to mourn, it seems, is his Presidency. ♦