Latest news with #JakeSullivan
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Embrace the cringe': at National History Day, kids impress judges by digging up the past
It only took 10 minutes for the trio of eighth-grade girls to recount the life story of Carol Ruckdeschel, the alligator-wrestling environmental activist sometimes called the 'Jane Goodall of sea turtles'. Inside the student union at the University of Maryland, about a 20-minute drive from Washington DC, and armed with papier-mache reptiles, they embarked on a performance that included a litany of costume changes and a pony-tailed rendition of the late president Jimmy Carter, an ally of the 83-year-old Ruckdeschel's work. When it concluded, the scary part began. A panel of judges peppered the girls with questions. Why did some people consider Ruckdeschel to be controversial? The girls hesitated. 'Sorry,' said one, 'but what does that word mean?' It was the first day of National History Day (NHD). In its 51st year, the annual US-based competition invites the top middle and high school students from more than half a million competitors to present their projects: documentaries, performances, websites, papers and exhibits on any topic from history, as long it adheres to the year's theme. The winners get cash prizes and the admiration of their teenage peers. The students come from all over – places like Oregon, Indonesia, North Dakota, Guam, Arkansas and China. Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden's national security adviser, competed more than 20 years ago, as did Guy Fieri, whose project on the soft pretzel's origin helped inspire a future career as a TV star restaurateur. I also competed in NHD, reaching the Florida state competition in 2007 and 2009 with my twin brother. As I reported this year, I joked with students that I'd finally made it to nationals, just 16 years too late. Hardly any of them were even alive then, and the national reality couldn't have changed more. In April, NHD lost $336,000 after the Trump administration and the 'department of government efficiency' slashed funding for the National Endowment of Humanities, putting NHD in jeopardy. 'We had so many messages from kids saying, 'Please, please, please we can't let History Day go down,'' said Cathy Gorn, NHD executive director since 1995 and 'the Taylor Swift of history', as one student dubbed her last year (to many, there is no greater compliment). On social media she made an impassioned plea for donations. Last-ditch fundraising followed, including contributions from students, like a group from New York that held a bake sale and sent Gorn more than $300 in proceeds. With that, the competition found new legs – for this year, at least. 'It's kids learning,' said Gorn, 'what is controversial about that?' And these students want to learn the full history – both its roses and its thorns, or what Alexis de Tocqueville called 'reflective patriotism'. 'They have no filter,' John Taylor, the NHD state-coordinator from Maine, told me. 'They'll call anyone and ask them anything.' When I competed, the cardinal rule was to abstain from any citing of Wikipedia, a transgression that today seems nostalgically benign. Students now learn to hunt down reputable sources in an era defined by untrustworthy generative AI and revisionist histories. Some students even found that sources they'd cited in their research this spring – from governmental websites, no less – had disappeared altogether. 'You start to realize that many of them do more research for NHD than you did for your master's thesis,' Taylor laughed. He told me about a 130-page bibliography a student once turned in: 'That thing could have taken down a woodland creature.' These are history-defining times. Do students at NHD see the parallels, the precedence, in their projects? 'Oh yeah,' said Gorn, 'they get it.' The scene from the student union last Monday could have come straight from a Where's Waldo book. In one corner, a life-size cutout of George Washington leaned against a wall, until it was scooped up by girls in colonial-era ballgowns. Four lanky boys huddled together, their traffic-cone-orange dress shirts illuminated in the morning light. I heard a boy reading through a script, his manufactured accent undulating between George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and wild west cowboy. In another hallway, lanyarded coordinators carried folders full of research papers and flash drives loaded with digital backups of student-directed documentaries (after a snafu at the state level, one group told me they'd brought eight). Nervous students were tailed by teachers and nervous parents with little brothers and sisters in tow, just happy to be along for the ride. As I walked in and out of competition rooms over the next three days, I saw a spectrum of stories that spoke to this year's competition theme, 'Rights and Responsibilities' – the Elgin marbles, birthright citizenship, lobotomies, Martin Luther King Jr, social security, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the first Black character to appear in Charlie Brown. The theme, which sought to magnify the relationship between individuals and society, seemed especially prescient, even though it is one of several that NHD has recycled over the years. At a table finishing up a meal from Chick-fil-A sat Chloe Montgomery, an eighth-grader from Indiana, with her father, Ryan. The topic she chose to research – the Salem witch trials – had been bubbling up for years. 'You grow up hearing about the trials a lot,' said Chloe, 'like in Hocus Pocus!' Her project had ascended from the local competition in her hometown of Mishawaka, through regionals and states, all the way to nationals. Now, father and daughter were in the US capital for the very first time. She, too, was impressed by the spectrum of project topics: 'I saw one about Green Day!' In the hallway after the performance about Ruckdeschel, I caught up with the eighth-grade trio. 'We've had hundreds of sleepovers to work on this!' said Zoe Otis. Not only that, they'd traveled from their homes in Knoxville, Tennessee, ferried from mainland Georgia and then biked about 35 miles roundtrip – 'half of that was in the dark!' – to meet Ruckdeschel on Cumberland Island, where she lives alone in a cabin. They'd spoken with the octogenarian recluse, who still keeps a research lab with jars of turtle guts and bugs. For the girls, it was an eye-opening experience that at times bordered on gut-wrenching. 'There was a giant, dead boar on the side of her house,' said Gemma Walker. 'She hunts, and eats roadkill.' 'We always tell ourselves to 'embrace the cringe',' said Addy Aycocke, laughing. This, it turned out, was part of the reason Ruckdeschel was considered controversial, along with her decades-long jousting with the National Park Service and the Carnegie family over environmental protection of the island and its sea turtles. It's this flavor of research – active, firsthand, hands-dirtying – that history professors at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who started NHD in 1974, saw as the antidote to the traditional textbooks and multiple choice repetition that often went hand in hand with learning history. A science-fair-like competition, they hoped, would propel students to both dig into dusty archives and track down primary accounts – to feel history, rather than to memorize it. Later on, I heard stray conversation about Trump's deployment of the national guard and marines in Los Angeles. Less than 10 miles away, tanks were arriving in Washington for a military parade. 'You look at the news, and all you see is negativity,' Gorn told a room of volunteer judges. 'But spend a couple of days at National History Day and it'll give you hope.' It was true. There was an attitude of genuine, mutual encouragement that seems difficult to come by these days. The students seem to understand that nothing is a zero-sum game, that striving for excellence and being amiable with competitors are not mutually exclusive. When I spoke to Gorn a week before, we'd discussed the critical role of history, and its sometimes precarious place in school curriculum. 'No Child Left Behind left history education behind,' she said of the 2001 congressional act that, in a quest for equality and accountability in schools, shifted focus to standardized testing and left less time for the humanities. Meanwhile, the national emphasis on Stem subjects could be traced to the National Defense Education Act that followed the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957. These subjects are important – she doesn't argue that – but 'not at the expense of history'. 'It's a real disservice to our democracy,' said Colleen Shogan, who works with NHD and was archivist of the United States until February, when she was dismissed by Trump without reason. 'We are not teaching kids how the constitution functions and what the principles are that we all agree upon as Americans.' The politicized situations that some history teachers find themselves facing are a marked difference from when Gorn began in education in the 1980s. Disgruntled parents and school boards sometimes seek repercussions if lessons don't align with their own interpretations of history, often along the lines of race and equity. 'I've heard many [teachers] say, 'If I can't teach complete history, I can't teach any more,' Gorn said. Not only that, she lamented the attitude that learning the thorny parts of the nation's past is somehow teaching kids 'to hate America'. Not true, she said. 'Kids are resilient and they know when you're pulling it over their eyes.' Young people need to understand that there has been struggle. 'That's how we develop empathy,' she said. 'Learning history does that.' It was 6.58pm on Monday, and a crowd had gathered around flat screens throughout the student center. In a few minutes, they'd display the list of competition finalists. Students were anxious. Some killed time by doing each other's hair. At 7pm, several shrieks sounded. A little brother covered his ears and mouthed 'Oww!' while student faces split into a telling binary of smiles and frowns. Teachers and parents – quite a respectful bunch when compared to the kind you might find on a suburban soccer field – squinted to read the tiny font. 'Maybe that judge wasn't so bad after all,' said one mother. Three of the smiling students were from Minnesota. Sara Rosenthal and Helen Collins had been selected to move on for their documentary about Radio Free Europe, the American soft-power station begun during the cold war to spread democratic influence to communist countries. Their friend, Jack Grauman, was also advancing. For months, he'd researched Frank Kameny for his one-person performance about the astronomer who'd been removed from the US army in 1957 for being gay. It was 'powerful' to be headed to the finals, Grauman said, and just miles away from Washington, no less, where the current administration is targeting LGBTQ+ rights. Meanwhile, funding for Radio Free Europe is on the Doge chopping block, as are press freedoms around the world. Their teacher told me the girls had to update the ending of their documentary several times to keep up. Even here, students and educators sometimes hesitated before answering my questions. One group of students, from Singapore, was talkative until I asked about their projects' relevance to today – one was specifically about American borders. In my periphery, I saw their classmates miming the slit-throat gesture, as if to say 'don't answer that one'. Later, I spoke with a group of judges inside the forest of elaborate poster board presentations. One of them kindly declined to go on the record: 'I'm a federal worker. I don't want any attention.' Back with the Minnesotans, the outlook was rosy. How would they be celebrating? 'We're going to the dance!' Before leaving campus for the evening, I poked my head into what I'd expected to be an awkward affair. Bass of early 2000s hits – oldies to this crowd – pounded through the walls. I passed two middle-schoolers outside. 'It's weird to talk about your exes to your new boyfriend, you know?' 'But I want to know everything!' Inside, hundreds of students were cherishing their success or drowning their relative disappointment with fruit juices and soda. It was a mocktail of hoodies, high heels, recycled homecoming dresses, black-suited vests, and one especially-civic-minded student in a T-shirt that said 'Support Local Music'. The trading of pins – each state or country delegation had brought their own – provided much of the necessary social lubrication. And then it was Thursday: results day. Across the hardwood of an indoor arena, delegations marched in like at an Olympic closing ceremony, some carrying flags and inflatable animals and wearing bedazzled top-hats. Once everyone took their seats, Gorn stepped up to the microphone, pumped her hands in the air and roared: 'Happy History Day everybody!' Then she teed up a special treat: a congratulatory video from a real-life Thunderbird pilot and NHD alum. Finally, it was time to hear the results. It was a successful day for the Minnesotan contingent. Grauman won a special prize for 'equality in history', climbing the steps to the stage wearing a large smile and a pair of Crocs. Almost two hours of nervous waiting later, Rosenthal and Collins heard their names announced at last – the silver for middle school documentary was theirs. The gold went to a pair of students from Chiang Mai, Thailand, for their look into the UK miners' strike of 1984. If funding comes through, next year's NHD theme – 'Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History' – will again seem especially relevant. If there was a silver lining to the uncertainty, Gorn said, it's that students felt how a decision made far away in the nation's capital could directly affect them. As Vritti Udasi, a high schooler from Florida, told me: 'The place where we are today didn't come out of thin air. If we study history, dissect it, then we can progress.'
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
A Biden official says Israel committed war crimes. Who else will come forward?
Politicians lie, and the people around them do too. When it's convenient – when the whole world is pulsing with revulsion, for example – they begin to reveal flavors of the truth. The Biden administration lied more than most, its public-facing members particularly. Its policy in Palestine was to embrace the Israelis in a 'bear hug' – to smother them with love. And there's thin cover for a genocide beyond lies. Now, Matthew Miller, the former state department spokesperson, is speaking out. It appears he has a new job – one that seems to require public-facing work, which may explain his decision to sit for a Sky News interview. You take your lumps and get it over with. Only I'm not sure it's over for Miller. In the interview, the former spokesman shared his personal view that it is 'without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes'. Asked if that had been true when he was employed by the government, he suggested that lying is just part of the job: 'You are a spokesperson for the president, the administration, and you espouse the positions of the administration. And when you're not in the administration, you can just give your own opinions.' Miller isn't alone. The Biden-era spokespeople for the genocide included the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and the deputy state department spokesperson Vedant Patel, as well as Jake Sullivan, a primary policymaker for an addled president, who represented the actual center of power along with John Kirby, a former admiral, and Antony Blinken, the former secretary of state. The group spent the period from October 2023 to January 2025 lying to an anguished public. They lied scornfully (Jean-Pierre) or gleefully (Miller), mawkishly (Kirby and Blinken), or blandly (Patel and Sullivan). And they did it every day, for 15 months. They told extravagant lies: Hamas beheaded 40 babies. They told savage lies about 'command and control' centers under al-Shifa hospital – they told us not to believe what we'd seen and to believe what they couldn't show us. They lied about Israeli investigations and Biden's humanity, his capacity for 'empathy'. Every lie they told was consequential, about infants in incubators; about the execution of Hind Rajab, a child; and about the way in which their pier was used to facilitate an Israeli massacre. They lied about the things that matter most. They lied to obscure a genocide, spinning whorls of confusion. In the Sky News interview, Miller twitched visibly just before he made the remarks about war crimes. Watching him, I wondered what had happened to his confidence, the brazen and unembarrassed way in which he skipped, lightly, through so much human carnage, whistling past Gaza's profusion of mass graves. And yet, despite himself, the former spokesperson continues to lie. He claims to not know if what the Biden administration has orchestrated in Gaza is a genocide, perhaps to shield himself from the worst of the moral reckoning. The tactic he's taken is a tired one, and the interview is self-indulgent. But at least Miller is braver than the others. In a video recorded at Harvard's Kennedy School, which is where both Brett McGurk, who also helped orchestrate the genocide, and Jake Sullivan have taken jobs, Sullivan meekly, dishonestly describes 'the choices the president made'. The choices the president made. It all brings to mind the former secretary of defense Robert McNamara's book, In Retrospect, a self-exculpatory account of his participation in the Vietnam war. Two million civilians were killed in that conflict, which achieved nothing, and was fought for nothing. And yet, McNamara waited 20 years to publish that account, long after many of his victims had died. So with that retrospective, we may encourage Sullivan, Miller, McGurk, Jean-Pierre, Blinken, Patel and all the others to come forward. If they do, they will be pilloried and mocked and verbally abused for what they've done. But they should do it anyway, because they owe their victims so much. Not least the truth. Ahmed Moor is a writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace
Wall Street Journal
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘Original Sin' and Foreign Policy
It came at a high price, but Joe Biden finally drove his successor off the front pages last week. First came the steady drip of devastating stories about Mr. Biden's closest aides' conspiracy to conceal his mental and physical decline, culminating with the publication of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's 'Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.' On top of that came the news that Mr. Biden has stage 4 prostate cancer. The most remarkable thing about 'Original Sin' to this reader was the near-total absence of President Biden's foreign-policy team from the account. This isn't because they weren't around or in the know. Messrs. Tapper and Thompson emphasize that both Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan had better and more regular access to the increasingly walled-off president than any other cabinet secretaries or senior aides beyond the inner ring of Biden loyalists that the authors call the Politburo. We also know from many sources that European leaders were worried and puzzled by Mr. Biden's irregular behavior at international meetings. Yet 'Original Sin' focuses much less scrutiny on Mr. Biden's foreign policy team's actions and omissions than on those of his domestic advisers.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Mortal Sin
In an interview last week, Joe Biden's national security adviser claimed he was stunned to see his boss' disastrous debate performance in June 2024. 'What happened in that debate was a shock to me,' Jake Sullivan said. 'I think it was a shock to everybody.' Seeing the president incapable of completing sentences and lost in a tangle of words may have been shocking for someone who routinely avoids the news. But it wasn't surprising to anyone paying even casual attention to Biden over the past several years. And it certainly wasn't a surprise to Jake Sullivan. On December 9, 2022, more than 18 months before the debate that would end his political career, Biden forgot the names of two White House senior officials. One of them was Jake Sullivan. Standing in the Outer Oval with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Kate Bedingfield, his communications director, he couldn't come up with either of their names, according to one witness. 'Steve …' he said to Sullivan. 'Steve …' he continued, obviously struggling to recall Jake's name. He turned to Bedingfield. 'Press,' he called her, as he beckoned them into the Oval Office. This incident comes to us in a new book from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson that has had Washington buzzing over the past week, titled Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. It's one new anecdote among dozens that, taken together, provide an authoritative, detailed, and devastating account of one of the most consequential scandals in modern American history: The president of the United States was unfit to perform the duties of the job, and those close to him went to extraordinary lengths to hide his deterioration. 'Joe Biden knows my name,' Sullivan insisted last week, saying he doesn't recall the episode described in the book. But for Sullivan to have truly been surprised by Biden's confusion and incoherence at the election's only presidential debate would have required his ignorance of dozens of similar incidents, many of them public, as well as sweeping changes to the way the White House staff and the Biden campaign handled the president to hide his decline. Beginning early in his presidency, top White House advisers and Biden family members devised plans to accommodate his decline. As the president's limitations became clearer, according to Tapper and Thompson, White House speechwriters 'were slowly adapting to Biden's diminished capabilities.' The communications team dramatically limited his public appearances and media interviews. Internal conversations with staff and members of his Cabinet were scripted for Biden—including discussions that took place beyond the eyes of the White House press corps. Biden's staff imposed tight limits on his daily schedule, often restricting his meetings and activities to midday hours when Biden was thought to be at his best. As his gait became more unsteady, and after some embarrassing falls, his team sought to shorten distances he'd walk and recommended changes to his footwear that would provide the president with additional stability. Biden's fundraisers were reprogrammed with strict limits on the number of questions Biden took from his audiences and little time for spontaneous interaction with those funding his reelection. All the while, top Biden advisers insisted to reporters that the president was fine—as sharp as ever, in command of facts, energetic in meetings, perfectly capable not only of running for reelection but serving another four years. The public gaffes were anomalous, they insisted, indicative of nothing more than the occasional brain fart, and we all have those, right? His literal missteps? Okay, he's getting a little older and he has arthritis in his feet, they would concede, but none of this has any effect on his ability to do the job. If a reporter was imprudent enough to ask about Biden's increasing number of blunders, they'd be quietly threatened with revoked access to White House sources and sometimes attacked in public. The main contribution Original Sin makes to the public debate about Biden is providing new, authoritative reporting on the president's decline and the concerted behind-the-scenes effort by top Democrats to conceal it. But for the average reader, the most powerful part of the book comes in a six-page section called 'Special Counsel Robert Hur, Part Two,' when the authors retell a story already in the public domain. The battle over the report by special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Biden's alleged mishandling of classified information, was widely covered at the time. Hur and his team listened to recordings of conversations Biden had with Mark Zwonitzer, a writer who helped him with the book he wrote after serving as vice president. The recordings were important for two reasons: Biden discussed his possession of classified materials and seemed to have shared them with his co-writer, and the former vice president, in the words of Tapper and Thompson, 'sounded very old and quite diminished. In 2017.' In the fall of 2023, Hur interviewed Biden twice for a total of more than five hours. The special counsel concluded that, while the president may have committed crimes by knowingly keeping and discussing classified information after his service as vice president, he shouldn't be prosecuted—in part because a jury would likely find him a 'sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.' Top Democrats and sympathetic media personalities insisted that Hur was exaggerating the president's mental deterioration and savaged him as a right-wing hack motivated by politics. For several days, they subjected Hur to an unceasing stream of withering attacks on his character and motives. But a closer look at the interviews (and the actual audio, released publicly by Axios over the weekend) made clear that if anything, Hur was understating Biden's struggles. The special counsel's questioning of Biden was gentle, not adversarial. Tapper and Thompson republish excerpts of the transcripts nearly verbatim, and the result is an extraordinarily uncomfortable read. There is a relentlessness to Biden's confusion—'I'm, at this stage, in 2009, am I still vice president?' Biden wonders aloud—that leaves the reader hoping for someone to intervene. And at one point, in the middle of a long Biden digression on losing his son, Beau, to cancer, Hur does just that. 'Sir, I'm wondering if this is a good time to take a break briefly,' Hur said. 'Would that be—' But Biden kept going. No one who had read these transcripts—let alone worked closely with the president daily on crucial matters of national security, as Jake Sullivan had—should have been surprised by Biden's debate performance a few months later. With so much public evidence of Biden's decline and so many Democrats with a window into the president's deterioration, why did the establishment media pay so little attention to the story? It's not true, as some professional right-wing outrage merchants have claimed, that the establishment media failed to report on Biden's mental acuity altogether. But major investigations were rare enough that we can tally them on one hand and have digits left over—and it could be argued that we can count them with the same finger many Americans extend in our direction when asked about their views of contemporary American journalism. On June 5, 2024, the Wall Street Journal published a piece by Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes headlined, 'Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.' The story relied on interviews with 'more than 45 people over several months' and reported that people who have worked with Biden, 'including Democrats and some who have known him back to his time as vice president, described a president who appears slower now, someone who has both good moments and bad ones.' Anyone who follows politics understands when the Washington press corps is obsessed with a story. Take, for example, the New York Times' coverage of the Al Qa'qaa weapons depot in the week leading up to the 2004 election. The Times reported on October 25 that the U.S. military had allowed 380 tons of high explosives held at Al Qa'qaa to go missing, demonstrating the incompetence of the Bush administration's oversight of Iraq. The Times alone ran about two dozen stories about Al Qa'qaa over the next week, and there were 823 mentions of Al Qa'qaa in English-language media over the same period. The coverage of Biden's deterioration never reached that fever pitch—until the debate. Prior to that night, the approach to covering Biden's age and cognitive fitness was often timid and apologetic—more 'let's do this story we don't want to do,' than 'let's go all-in on this big scandal.' There are several reasons for this: general ideological bias, fear of helping Donald Trump, worries about access to the White House, and more. A Republican with such extensive public evidence of cognitive decline would have undoubtedly been subject to relentless questioning by the country's leading political journalists. The failure to include cognitive test results on his medical disclosure forms would have been taken as prima facie evidence of a cover-up. White House press briefings would have featured hostile exchanges with a press secretary denying observable reality, and background sources would have been badgered to acknowledge public concern reflected in polling. Even without this everyday coverage, voters consistently told pollsters they had concerns about Biden's age and his mental fitness. In the spring of 2023, only 32 percent of voters surveyed in a Washington Post/ABC News poll said they believed Biden had the 'mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president.' An NBC News poll taken in June of that same year found that 55 percent of voters had 'major' concerns about Biden having the physical and mental health to serve as president. The media failure went beyond sins of omission to sins of commission, too. Perceptions of Biden's struggles were explained away in reported pieces as the result of misleading 'cheap fakes' or downplayed as problems anyone might have. Biden partisans denigrated anyone who raised concerns. The attack on Robert Hur from Jennifer Rubin, then a Washington Post columnist, was typical. 'But it was Hur's gratuitous smear about Biden's age and memory—most egregiously, his far-fetched allegation that Biden could not recall the date of his son Beau's death—that transformed a snide report into a political screed,' Rubin wrote. (In fact, Hur's claim about Biden's memory was not at all gratuitous, his allegation that Biden didn't recall the dates of Beau's death was accurate, and his report was neither snide nor a political screed.) MSNBC's Joe Scarborough did the same and later lashed out at anyone who might question Biden's abilities. 'Start your tape right now because I'm about to tell you the truth,' he said. 'And 'F' you if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.' Scarborough stood by those comments in an interview this week. Few people who aren't related to Joe Biden or on his payroll are making that case today. In an appearance on 'The View' two weeks ago, Biden was asked by Alyssa Farah Griffin about reporting on his diminished mental acuity. 'Mr. President, since you left office, there have been a number of books that have come out—deeply sourced from Democratic sources—that claim in your final year, there was a dramatic decline in your cognitive abilities, in the final year of your presidency,' Griffin said. 'What is your response to these allegations? And are these sources wrong?' Biden began his response. 'They are wrong,' he said. 'There's nothing to sustain that, number one. Number two, you know, think of what we were left with. We were left with a circumstance where we had a, ah, in insurrection where I started—we, that, not since the Civil War. We were in a circumstance where we were in a position where—well, I'll—pandemic, because of the incompetence of the last outfit end up over a million people dying, a million people dying. And we're also in a situation where we found ourselves, ah, unable to deal with, ah, a lot of just basic issues, which I won't go into—interest of time. And so we went to work, and we got it done. And, you know, one of the things that, that—well, I talked too long.' As Biden struggled, his wife, sitting by his side, jumped in to answer the question. 'And Alyssa, one of the things I think is that the people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us,' Jill Biden said. 'And they didn't see how hard Joe worked—every single day. I mean, he'd get up, he'd put in a full day, and then at night'—the camera cut away to a shot of Joe Biden, his face frozen in the distant stare so familiar to families who have dealt with loved ones struggling with cognitive issues—'I'd be in bed reading my book and he was still the one on the phone, reading his briefings, working with staff. I mean, it was nonstop. The White House, being the president, is not like a job; it's a lifestyle. It's a life that you live. You live it 24 hours a day. That phone can ring at 11 o'clock at night or two in the morning. It's constant. You never leave it. And Joe worked really hard. I think he was a great president. And if you look at things today, give me Joe Biden anytime.' One can understand why Jill Biden would stand by her man and try to defend her husband's legacy. But it's precisely because the presidency is more than a job—because 'it's a life that you live … 24 hours a day'—that the cover-up in which she and others in Biden's inner circle participated is such a disgrace. The recent news that the former president was diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer only exacerbates how dire the situation truly was. Good days and bad days at the end of Grandpa's life are heartbreaking. But good days and bad days at the end of an American presidency are dangerous—and the effort to conceal them is a scandal of the first order.
Boston Globe
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Who's speaking at commencement events around N.H.?
May 16 at 4 p.m. ( ) Jake Sullivan, national security advisor to former president Joe Biden who is married to Representative Maggie Goodlander, will address law school graduates at White Park in Concord. In August, he will join the UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law faculty as a senior fellow. University of New Hampshire May 17 at 9 a.m., 12:30 p.m., and 4 p.m. ( ) Scott 'Kidd' Poteet is a retired U.S. Air Force veteran who Get N.H. Morning Report A weekday newsletter delivering the N.H. news you need to know right to your inbox. Enter Email Sign Up Saint Anselm College ( ) Advertisement May 17 at 10 a.m. Carlos Lozada is a Peruvian journalist who won the Dartmouth College June 15 at 9:30 a.m. ( ) Sandra Oh is an actor and Advertisement This story first appeared in Globe NH | Morning Report, our free newsletter focused on the news you need to know about New Hampshire, including great coverage from the Boston Globe and links to interesting articles from other places. If you'd like to receive it via e-mail Monday through Friday, Amanda Gokee can be reached at
