Book Review: The Bidens: Inside the First Family's Fifty-Year Rise to Power
by John Kendall Hawkins
"Why don't you say something nice instead of being a smart-ass all the time?"
- Joe Biden, Sh*t My Vice-President Says by Threshold Editions (2010)
To understand my early journey toward manhood is to invoke the bitterness of the nameless soul survivor from Notes from Underground and the sense of violated childhood I felt resonating from the opening passages of Catcher in the Rye. I was lost, and rather surprised that I was making progress through it. Probably the most decisive positive influence, the one that may actually have saved a wretch like me, was the constant care and inspiration to live now shown me by Catholics -- specifically, the brothers at Catholic Memorial High in Boston and those at Camp Lasalette in Ipswich, where I spent a couple of summers, including the Moon Landing one. And the nuns at Sacred Heart weren't any slouches either on the road to Bethlehem, even looking the other way the time I kneed the school bully, who'd made countless kids cry, right in the jingle bells.
Everything that moved me about goodness in the world and in the idea of communion, and provided me with a sense of exaltation and the sancta simplicitus of the Golden Rule and becoming, introjecting Christ through transubstantiation -- was all due to these brothers who were there for me. They weren't bookish monks, but happy, smart, and activists (I felt like I had my own squad of Berrigan Brothers assigned to save my soul). I've heard many tales growing up of priests bringing evil to childhood and desecrating the Vibe, but my Catholicism, though now long lapsed, was a joyous intersection that saved my life.
My life as a Catholic boy, while not as fraught as that described by Jim Carroll on his album by the same name, was still full of sin and worry (including the time some LaSalette brothers got me shitfaced at a steakhouse when I was 12); but it was also an introduction to Latin, rituals, Bach and Handel, homilies and the sympathetic empowerment of the priesthood, and of the curious practice of money in little brown envelopes being coughed up when the basket came around. (I was once with an adult at Mass who put a button in the basket; presumably he's now Satan's seamstress in Hell.) All such memories, vague as they are now, proved a useful and rather interesting filter through which to read Ben Schreckinger's new book, The Bidens: Inside the First Family's Fifty-Year Rise to Power. Biden is only the second Catholic elected president (JFK was the first) and Schreckinger imbues the narrative with references to his faith that enrich his political life.
It turns out this Catholic overlay is an insightful strategy for Schreckinger to employ as he brings us through the narrative of the slow-burn rise to ultimate power of the Biden family. Because, really, The Bidens briefly opens with a contemporary reference to the NY Post laptop email scandal (repairshopwiththeblindguygate) and closes with it. The political biography of the family -- not just Joe -- is sandwiched between. The implicit question to the reader is: How did we get here?
Schreckinger is a national political correspondent for Politico magazine. Most recently he covered Trump's years of shenanigans. He adds at his website, "He has also written on politics, economics, culture and their intersections for Slate, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and the Financial Times, among others, from Boston, Ireland and Burma." His background in the classics is not indifferent here, as his discussion of the Biden family has the specialty to it, as if he were deconstructing the life of Oedipus before his blindness cost him -- and his family -- everything. Classic tragedies are about the fall of great hubris-ridden families. But probably you won't need your hamartia hankies for this one, and if there is any catharsis in this one -- well, let's just say that the Riddle hasn't yet been proposed by the sphinx-like MSM.
So Schreckinger starts with the Biden family Catholicism. But not just any Catholicism -- not yours or mine -- but Kennedy Catholicism. Schreckinger spends roughly the first third of The Bidens building their Catho cred. And then blends in the desire, family-wide, for the Bidens to be seen as Kennedy-esque in stature and esteem. Il Papa faves, but not really, as that would make the blood of the loud-knocking Lutheran derivatives boil. Kennedy, who did not finish his term as president (nor will Joe, if his gathering senility is any indicator), had to put up with thit about his likely allegiance to Rome early on and often, but put the issue to rest in famous 1960 speech where he avers "the absolute separation of church and state."
This was no small matter (but was unique), as all other presidents had been either Let It Be Deists or Lutherans knock knock knockin on the Castle church's door as they hammered their 95 protest theses that essentially rejected the assertion of the Church as the mouthpiece of God, with tithes and indulgences rejected, too. The latter was sometimes seen as the equivalent of buying your way out of conscription for war for a price or sending someone else to Hell in your place. This led to the adoption of the Vulgar Latinate Bible.
Like Kennedy, the Bidens claim, they often had to reaffirm to the Protestant majority their commitment to the separation of Church and State, which, as the late actor Ed Asner (Lou Grant) pointed out in a book before he died, didn't worry the Prots much, as they were always bringing in God to defend their nefarious doings, even though God is not mentioned in the Constitution. Still, that mysterious placement of the brown envelope in the basket at Mass causes the freeman's eyebrow to raise. It probably isn't a payoff, but an infiltrating Protestant might have a button ready, to be read as a wink by a counting prelate later.
Schreckinger cites Biden biographer Jules Witcover in describing them as a "particularly tight Irish Catholic family that put loyalty, along with religion, above all other considerations." Following on from the issue of Church-and-State, maybe the key word in the preceding sentence is "loyalty." As with the Kennedys, there was lots of loyalty shown throughout the family that resulted in tight knit nepotism for what Schreckinger calls "the Biden clan, America's middle-class Kennedys." Schreckinger goes out of his way to paint the Bidens as Third Tier Kennedy-esques, with John Kerry and his Catholic family placed between the Real Deal and Knock-Off Joe's family.
Schreckinger provides a neat example of how the Bidens borrowed from You-Know-Whos mystique early in his political career (we're told Joe always thought he'd be president, even as a little kid), when he was running for the Senate for the first time up against the multi-term incumbent Caleb Boggs. They held "coffee klatches" over which Jean "Mama Biden" presided. He writes that the klatches were held:
around the state to give the housewives of Delaware a chance to see Joe up close...After each get-together, Neilia and Val sent a handwritten note to each attendee...They had gotten the idea from the Kennedys, who hosted family teas as part of Jack's 1952 Massachusetts Senate campaign, another long shot challenge to an entrenched Republican incumbent.
Schreckinger further notes that even Time magazine was calling him "a candidate in the Kennedy mold." Molds can be toxic. Sounds like a job for Concobrium.
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