The Highest Calling, page 50
DR: The campaign was waged largely from his house. He didn’t campaign that much physically because of COVID. Who was running the campaign?
FF: Joe Biden usually is his own most important campaign advisor, his most important foreign policy advisor, his most important economic advisor. He has strong instincts about how to conduct things based on his many years. This was just what events imposed upon the campaign. The pandemic shut everything down, and he was campaigning as the candidate of prudence in the middle of it.
DR: I’ve seen a lot of presidential debates but I’d never seen one like the first debate with President Trump. Was Biden prepared for that kind of interruption? What did he think of his performance afterwards?
FF: You can be intellectually prepared for Donald Trump, but then to actually experience it in that kind of setting, especially for somebody who was raised in the Senate with its genteel traditions—I think it kind of rocked Biden’s world.
DR: The general election is held. President Trump doesn’t agree with the outcome. What did Biden think? No transition was authorized, so what did he do after he won?
FF: The transition is fascinating for many reasons, but among them is this. Joe Biden’s best friend is a guy named Ted Kaufman, who had been his chief of staff in the Senate and who, when Biden became vice president, got appointed to the Senate for a brief period, then was Biden’s emissary to the Obama transition. Kaufman is an engineer who worked at DuPont. He looked at the transition process and said, “This is cockamamie. Everybody’s focused on the wrong things. It’s very inefficient.” And so, when he was a senator, he wrote an act to remake the presidential transition.
He and Biden began talking in March of 2020 about what the transition would look like. It’s one of the most impressive things, organizationally, that Biden did. It was a human resource operation that was extremely efficient.
DR: Jeff Zients, now chief of staff, ran the transition. Eventually, Biden is sworn in as president. Does he have his cabinet picked out in advance? How long would it take to get those people confirmed?
FF: One of the things Ted Kaufman understood was that the president has all this power to appoint people below the cabinet level. The goal was to have more than a thousand of those people in place on day one. Then they were very efficient about picking the cabinet.
DR: Their priority was dealing with COVID. When Biden took office, we were developing the vaccine, but there was no plan to distribute it.
FF: Biden had two big problems. The first was that the government had made this bet on Operation Warp Speed, but Pfizer, which made the vaccine that hit first, had not taken federal money because they didn’t want the government involved in their business. There was a very broken relationship with Pfizer, which didn’t have the manufacturing capacity to produce the amount of vaccine that was needed. So they needed to use the government to engage in, essentially, industrial policy to ramp up Pfizer’s production. The other problem was that when the Biden team came in, they kept asking, “Where is the plan to take this vaccine and stick it in people’s arms?” And they couldn’t find that plan despite asking for it everywhere.
DR: Because there was no plan.
FF: There was no plan.
DR: Ultimately, Jeff Zients and his team developed a plan. Did it work?
FF: It did. It was a commonsense plan for utilizing pharmacies as a primary way to distribute the vaccine, correcting for not just inequities but the lack of a delivery mechanism for poor communities. I think it was one of the most successful government programs of all time, because within six months of Biden coming into office, it was possible to stroll into your neighborhood pharmacy to get a shot that would save your life.
DR: As part of getting the economy going again after being hurt by COVID, President Biden proposed an enormous stimulus package. We’d already had a stimulus package passed under President Trump. How large was the Biden stimulus package?
FF: It was $1.9 trillion. Some of that was not just stimulus. It was money that was needed to fund the pandemic efforts. But in between the time the stimulus was conceived and then passed, the Democrats won two special elections in Georgia, which gave them control of the Senate.
They had originally intended to create a stimulus that was $1.2 trillion, approximately, in size, but the Senate Democrats had this long wish list of programs. Usually, in an instance like that—this is what happened with Obama—you get negotiated down, but in this instance, they got negotiated up.
DR: Of the $1.9 trillion that they wanted, what actually passed?
FF: There was a big expansion of the Child Tax Credit. There were programs that were essentially forms of reparations to Black farmers. There was the pandemic relief. There was money that got plowed into state and local governments. A lot of this was a correction for the failures of the Obama stimulus in 2009. The conventional wisdom within Democratic circles was that that bill was too small and this time they had to err on the side of going too big.
DR: Larry Summers, head of the National Economic Council under President Obama, said later that he made a mistake in not having a big enough stimulus. This time, he said the stimulus was too big and would cause inflation. Did that upset President Biden?
FF: It did. Larry Summers is the type of person who would gnaw at President Biden, because he comes from this elite that Biden believes looks down on him. This was in the middle of Biden’s honeymoon period. Nobody in the Democratic Party was criticizing him. Summers was the skunk at the garden party. And Biden called him up and unloaded on him.
DR: Did Larry Summers ever get an appointment under President Biden?
FF: No, but he served a fairly important role. Biden continues to talk to him. I think there’s something a little bit strategic in their symbiotic relationship. Summers knows that he can influence Biden, and Biden keeps Summers close so that he doesn’t criticize him from outside.
DR: President Biden gets this piece of stimulus legislation passed. What’s his next priority with respect to Congress?
FF: He unveils two big pieces of legislation, known at the time as the jobs plan and the families plan. The jobs plan was what would become the infrastructure bill. The families plan is what became the expansion of the social safety net. The climate plan became known as Build Back Better, a phrase that Biden had used.
DR: For the Inflation Reduction Act, part of Build Back Better, a major effort was made to pass the Democratic Party wish list, more or less. At just over $3 trillion, did everybody agree that was the right number?
FF: The Democratic Party is a coalition in which there are progressives. A lot of the policy, in terms of campaign promises and what became the stuff of those bills, was hammered out in confabs, where they had representatives of the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren camps meet with representatives of the Biden camp and come up with some sort of consensus policy, which became the basis for these bills. The fundamental fact of the Biden presidency is that he has this one-vote edge in the Senate, which means that any senator essentially has a veto over legislation, and there was a raft of senators who didn’t like the price tag.
DR: Build Back Better was thought to be maybe too expensive by some Democrats, particularly the senator from Arizona and the senator from West Virginia. So they became very powerful. How did we go from Build Back Better to the Inflation Reduction Act? Was that Senator Joe Manchin basically dictating what was going to pass and Biden going along with it?
FF: There was this fascinating dynamic where Joe Manchin, a fairly conservative senator from West Virginia, becomes the primary negotiator on this bill. He’s willing to go along with things that he doesn’t actually believe in, because he wants to help Biden get a deal done. But at a certain point, as this stretches on, his desire to help the president and do what he considers to be the right thing come into tension. And it all blows up over a press release, of all things, at the end of the first year that Biden’s in office. Biden had thought he was getting this deal done with Manchin and that he almost had Manchin’s sign-off. He puts out this press release saying that they’re still negotiating. Manchin was taking all this heat from the left, and the fact that he was singled out in this press release made him feel like he was being targeted by the president. So he goes on Fox News, and he pulls the plug.
DR: Ultimately, the bill got passed. Then somebody came up with the name “Inflation Reduction Act,” which people laughed at. Who came up with the name?
FF: It was the product of several hands, but Joe Manchin especially liked the title.
DR: After the initial stimulus package, they focus on the infrastructure bill. How did they get a bipartisan infrastructure bill through Congress when President Trump hadn’t been able to?
FF: The moderates in the Senate began to feel their oats. They saw Joe Biden coming in. They thought he was one of their own, and that they were going to be the ones bossing the institution. They felt there was this opportunity to get something done in a bipartisan way. For Biden, this was a commonsense political deal to hatch.
DR: After a couple of weeks, the infrastructure bill passed. Who’s orchestrating this for Biden?
FF: A lot of that deal with the infrastructure bill was hashed out by the Senate. Then Biden sent in Steve Ricchetti, another former Biden chief of staff, who did a lot of negotiating back and forth. But Biden, who loves talking to foreign leaders, also loves talking to other senators. And there was a point where his chief of staff Ron Klain had to come into the office and say, “Mr. President, you’re not the majority leader. You’re not prime minister. I know that you love these negotiations, but you can’t be the one conducting them.”
DR: So President Biden pulls back from the day-to-day negotiations. Is he enjoying the job in the first year or so? The job he wanted for 48 years, he finally has it.
FF: One of the underrated aspects of Joe Biden, and probably one of the reasons why he’s running for reelection, is that he does love his job. There are moments where he hates the fact that the world doesn’t appreciate the great job he thinks he’s doing, but dealing with senators and foreign leaders is his happy place.
DR: Let’s talk about foreign policy. Initially there’s a concern that the Chinese are not going to be as friendly as we once had thought. President Trump had been tough on the Chinese. The Chinese thought that President Biden might be easier, like Obama. Why did the administration go toward a tough policy on China? Was that Joe Biden or his advisors?
FF: I think that’s Joe Biden. In the middle of the Obama administration, he’s at the vanguard of a revised policy toward China that becomes the consensus within the Democratic Party. He’d pull people aside and he’d start to talk about how China was engaged in unfair labor practices, unfair trade practices, how they had a poor human rights record.
Trump comes in and says all these things in a very impolitic sort of way, but he helps clear out some old conventional wisdom. Biden takes some of Trump’s populism and implements it in a more responsible, moderate sort of way.
DR: The Chinese are surprised. They thought President Biden was going to have a much easier policy. What is Biden’s policy now?
FF: He’s trying to increase the pressure on China, trying to treat them in a more adversarial way without having the whole relationship run off the rails and culminate in something very dangerous.
DR: Let’s talk about what many people would say is one of his biggest failures, which is Afghanistan and the retreat from it. He might not say that.
FF: He sure wouldn’t.
DR: The Pentagon is saying, at the beginning of the Obama years, “We need more troops in Afghanistan if we’re going to be able to do what we want to do.” In your book, you point out that Biden thinks that the Pentagon is taking advantage of a new president. And he tells Obama what?
FF: He says, “Don’t let the military jam you.”
DR: In the beginning of the Biden administration, the issue arises of whether we should get out of Afghanistan. What does Biden say?
FF: First of all, there was a 2021 deadline imposed by negotiations, a deal that the Trump administration had cut with the Taliban. If the Taliban met various conditions by then, the U.S. promised it would get out. In a way, this deadline was a gift to Joe Biden, who wanted to get out of Afghanistan. This timeline imposed pressure to make a decision. He begins to structure a decision-making process in order to avoid the bureaucratic pitfalls that stopped Obama from doing what he wanted.
DR: Despite the agreement that President Trump and his people negotiated, didn’t many people in the Pentagon think that since we had 3,000 or 4,000 military people there, we should keep them there for a variety of reasons?
FF: That is true, but there’s also an interesting dynamic happening in parallel to this. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had just survived the Trump years. He was eager to prove that the civilians were in charge, that it was his job as commander of the military to submit to whatever democratically derived decision the president came up with.
DR: President Biden says, “I want out. No more troops. Everybody’s gone.” And preparation was made for an airlift to get everybody out. What went wrong that resulted in American soldiers getting killed?
FF: Very practical things went wrong, almost too boring to talk about. But the big-picture thing was that Biden never elevated the humanitarian evacuation to be one of the top concerns of the whole bureaucratic process. It became something of an afterthought. And there was an intelligence failure, where we thought that the Taliban would take over but that it would happen after we were gone.
DR: The Taliban obviously made greater progress than we anticipated. Then a bomb was set off and killed 21 American soldiers. Biden is not happy with this. Does he say, as Kennedy did with the Bay of Pigs, “I take the responsibility. I made a mistake”?
FF: We see these terrible images transpiring at Hamid Karzai International Airport. The president pivots and changes strategy in a dramatic fashion. He says, essentially, that every C-17 leaving Afghanistan needs to be filled with civilians.
In the end, the State Department and the military improvised the evacuation of 125,000 Afghans. In that respect, Biden deserves credit for changing policy. As it relates to the broader failure in Afghanistan, his response is to say that this was always going to be messy, which is probably true. But he never said that to the American people in advance of the messiness.
DR: What is his relationship with Vladimir Putin? Did he know Putin pretty well as VP and senator?
FF: He did. He got sent in for some of the reset discussions the Obama administration had. He tells the story about how he stared into Putin’s eyes and told him afterwards, “You have no soul.” At which Vladimir Putin laughed.
DR: The U.S. gets intelligence saying that the Russians are massing on the Ukraine border. We declassified this intelligence and start telling our allies. Did President Biden want to make sure the allies knew this was going to happen?
FF: That, and also he wanted Russia to be morally culpable for what was about to happen. He didn’t want them to be able to plan any false-flag actions that would have shifted blame to the Ukrainians.
DR: President Biden rallies the European allies to support this effort to help Ukraine. He regards this as one of his most important accomplishments, to help Ukraine fight Russia, even though we haven’t figured out the end of that war yet. If our European allies had believed our intelligence, would we be in a stronger position? The allies didn’t initially believe that the invasion was going to happen.
FF: The biggest problem was that Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t acknowledge the intelligence and he didn’t act on it in the fullest sort of way. There were tough conversations that Tony Blinken, Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden all had with him, saying, “Your country is about to be invaded. You need to take all of these steps.”
Zelenskyy was in disbelief. He said Russia was just conducting coercive diplomacy. Meanwhile, he was acting on it in measured ways. But there were things that he could have done at the beginning of the war.
DR: There is a war going on in Gaza as a result of what happened on October 7th, 2023. Something similar had happened before, earlier in the Biden administration, when rockets from Gaza were fired into Israel. What was Biden’s view on how to handle that? And what is his relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu?
FF: He has a relationship with Netanyahu that goes back to the 1980s. He has a relationship with Israel that goes back much further. His father was a Zionist. He grew up with the sense that if Israel didn’t exist, it should be invented, that the Jewish claim to a state there was extremely strong, both because of the Holocaust and because of the larger history. He likes to boast about conversations he had with Golda Meir during the Yom Kippur War.
In May 2021, there are the rocket attacks from Gaza, and Israel begins to plan for a response. And Biden’s attitude was, “What I need to do is bank emotional trust with the Israelis, because they have very good reasons for feeling anxious. Then, when the moment comes, I’m going to spend down that capital in order to shorten the length of this war.”
DR: Let’s talk about the way he operates the presidency. Some presidents, like President Obama, prefer to read memos and then send notes back to the staff. Is Biden that way, or he likes to have the team come in and talk about it?
FF: He processes everything verbally. He takes binders home with him at the end of the day and scrawls notes, but he’s not an interior person. He can’t sit in his study late at night, like Obama did, and think everything through. He needs to talk it through. Those sessions can be quite lengthy, and he tends to conduct them with his various small group of advisors, most of whom have been with him for a long time.
