Biden’s Muse

In February 2019, Joe Biden paid the University of Delaware a visit to celebrate the renaming of its public policy school in his honor. Biden, a famously middling student, feigned sheepishness over his alma mater’s tribute and suggested the honor really belonged to his sister and perennial political adviser, Valerie. “She graduated with honors,” Biden explained. “I graduated.”

But Biden had no doubts about the brilliance of the man seated next to him on the stage: Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer who has spent the last two decades pounding out bestselling accounts of American presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and George H.W. Bush. “You tend to find genius in those with whom you agree,” Biden said in a very loose paraphrase of Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I think he’s a genius.” Meacham, sporting a black suit and wide cornflower tie nearly identical to the vice president’s, gave a hearty laugh through his wide and toothy grin, the faintest of blushes spreading across his face.

To mark the occasion, Biden had invited Meacham to Newark, Delaware, for a conversation about the biographer’s recent volume, , a 416-page meditation on how enlightened political leaders, propelled by a civic-minded citizenry, have rescued America at its darkest hours. Meacham had just finished explaining that the country’s soul “is not all good or all bad” but rather an abiding conflict between “our better angels” and “our worst instincts.” Biden’s praise came