With Surprise Reversal, Biden Rewrites His Legacy and Makes a Play for History

WASHINGTON — In his first memoir, President Joe Biden reflected on what at the time was the most searing moment of his political career. He had withdrawn from his first presidential campaign in disgrace, driven out by charges of plagiarism. But he resolved not to let it be the end of his story. “A person’s epitaph,” he observed, “was written when his or her last battle was fought.”

He wrote that in 2007 with the benefit of hindsight about his campaign collapse in 1987, long before the first primaries. Now, some 37 years after that flameout, Biden’s epitaph weighed heavily as he made surely the hardest political decision of his long career in Washington to give up the presidency after just one term and end his bid for reelection.

As he sat in isolation with COVID at his Delaware beach house these past few days, hacking and hacked off, Biden certainly did not want to go out without a fight. His Irish was up, as he would put it, about all those allies pressuring him to step down out of concern that he was too old to win the race. But at the end of the day, he was convinced that even at this late hour, his legacy would be enhanced by making the ultimate political sacrifice rather than be the president who allowed Donald Trump back into the White House.

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“By doing something that is anathema to the DNA of any politician, which is surrender the possibility of continuing in power, President Biden is making a consequential presidency even more so,” said Jon Meacham, a historian who has been a friend and outside adviser to Biden over the past few years.

“The phrase he’s used a lot is, ‘I’m a respecter of fate,’” Meacham added. “And I believe that.”

Fate looms large in the Oval Office. Every first-term president thinks about one thing: winning a second term. And every second-term president thinks about another thing: securing a legacy. Conventional wisdom has long held that to be a great president, it is necessary to win reelection. One-term presidents are afterthoughts in the pantheon of history. They never make Mount Rushmore.

And so surrendering without getting to Election Day went against the grain for Biden, both in terms of his own instinctively competitive nature and how he wants to be remembered. While he presented himself as a bridge to a new generation during his 2020 campaign, he quickly became entranced by the idea of becoming another Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson by building a new American social compact.

That informed the arguments from those trying to ease him into retirement, making the case that he would look better in history if he dropped out. And that explained all the flattering statements rushed out in the past 24 hours by Democrats, predicting that Biden would be ranked highly in the annals of posterity and even comparing him to George Washington, who voluntarily gave up power after two terms.

“In one term, he has already surpassed the legacy of most presidents who have served two terms in office,” Vice President Kamala Harris said Monday at the White House in her first public appearance since he dropped out and endorsed her as his successor Sunday.

Whether that is true or not, Timothy Naftali, a presidential scholar at Columbia University and the founding director of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, said one-term presidents, even if undervalued, can serve as important historical figures.

“We don’t see the value of transitional or restorative presidents, and we have made achieving reelection as the most important metric for determining presidential success,” he said. “Nevertheless, there have been great and near great presidents who were the right men — someday soon women — at the right time.”

Naftali cited President Gerald R. Ford, who helped heal the country after Watergate and Vietnam, and President George H.W. Bush, who presided over the end of the Cold War. Both lost their next elections but are viewed more generously by today’s generations than they were in their own time.

Biden has plenty of material to argue his case. He steered the country out of the COVID pandemic and restored the economy after months of lockdown. He passed a raft of progressive legislation on infrastructure, health care, climate change, veterans benefits and industrial policy that arguably make him the most successful legislative president since Johnson. He also bolstered NATO and helped stop Russia from swallowing up Ukraine.

But he will be remembered as well for a temporary but painful surge of inflation, record illegal immigration and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. And while he restored a sense of calm and dignity to the White House after Trump’s brutish and polarizing presidency that climaxed in violence Jan. 6, 2021, Biden never managed to unify the country as he had hoped.

The human part of his story, though, may shape his legacy. Already the oldest president in U.S. history, Biden, 81, insisted last year on running again even though he would be 86 at the end of his second term, forcing his party to go along despite deep disquiet. He refused to come to grips with the consequences until barely 100 days before the election. Hubris is never in short supply in the White House.

“His inability to acknowledge his limitations will long be seen as an example of a failure to come to grips with a growing problem in office,” said Tevi Troy, the author of multiple books on the presidency and a former aide to President George W. Bush. “Even though Biden eventually recognized reality and stepped aside, it was only after putting his party in turmoil and the country in potential jeopardy with its adversaries.”

The closest parallel may be Johnson, who stunned the nation in March 1968 by announcing at the end of a televised speech on Vietnam that he would not seek another term at a time when he was facing pressure from fellow Democrats running against him in primaries. In addition to his political problems, his health was a factor in his decision.

“Joe Biden also did what he believed was best for the country, opting to stand down due to advanced age and the increasing possibility that he would lose the election to Donald Trump and jeopardize the state of democracy,” said Mark K. Updegrove, a presidential historian and president of the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation. “Both men enhanced their legacies by declining to run again.”

Consciously or not, Biden’s statement Sunday echoed some of the language Johnson used about the need to focus on his official duties rather than his political aspirations. By happenstance, Biden had been tentatively scheduled to travel to Austin, Texas, on Wednesday for an event at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum marking the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, though that has now been postponed.

But of course, Biden’s place in the history books is not yet fully written. He has six months more in office with two wars overseas to manage and an election to preside over here at home. While he will not be on the ballot himself, leaving the mission to Harris, he still may be held responsible if Trump wins again, an outcome Democrats and many others consider a danger to the country.

“The election results will determine Biden’s legacy,” said Meena Bose, director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency at Hofstra University. He will go down in history “either as a president who sacrificed his personal ambition for party and public interests or as a president whose reluctance to allow a leadership transition prevented his party from waging the strongest possible campaign for the White House.”

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