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Joe Biden, the former president of the United States, defends his pullout from Afghanistan and his choice to pursue a second term in his memoir “Promise Me, America,” due out Tuesday, voicing scant remorse over either as he seeks to answer critics of both decisions, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The book covers his four years in office, from domestic legislation and the COVID-19 response to policy on Afghanistan, Ukraine and Israel. Its publication after a strong midterm showing for Democrats, the newspaper noted, lets Biden settle scores with party figures who moved to sideline him following his faltering debate against President Donald Trump.
Biden opens with the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol, writing: “America’s president wasn’t leading America, he was leading an insurrection. It was among the worst derelictions of duty by any president in our history.”
He nevertheless recounts discovering a gracious letter from his predecessor in the Oval Office on his first day. “It was almost as if there were two Donald Trumps,” he says.
That impression returned after the 2024 election, when Trump visited the White House for what Biden calls a “fawning” meeting. “You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends,” Trump said, according to the book.
On Afghanistan, Biden insists the widely criticized exit was correct. “I would make the same decision again. Ending the war in Afghanistan was the right thing to do,” he writes.
He acknowledges that then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, who chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “were both troubled by the implications of the decision.” Assurances that the capital would hold for at least six months after American troops left, he adds, “evaporated in a matter of days.”
World leaders also come in for candid appraisal. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden writes, “liked to slouch during a meeting, feigning indifference, like a teenager.”
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in turn, “could be moody and stubborn in our private conversations, and not as grateful as I would have expected.”
The memoir also says Biden turned down a request from Trump’s team for a letter authorizing direct talks with Putin before the handover, “unwilling to give them carte blanche for what I expected would be a kind of surrender, at Ukraine’s expense.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu draws sharper criticism, with Biden accusing him of placing short-term political survival above his country’s long-term needs.
“There wasn’t a ton of trust. I was also worried about Bibi’s Trump-like tendencies. He could play fast and loose with the truth, and thought nothing of bending democratic institutions to serve his personal needs,” he writes.
Biden says he will never regret backing Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, yet concedes that “too many innocent Palestinians were killed. Too much pain was inflicted on people with no connection to Hamas… I carry that with me.”
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Turning to his reelection bid, Biden says none of the top advisers he gathered in spring 2023 objected: “Everyone was in.”
He rejects claims that he misjudged his fitness for office. “People say I was deluding myself that I could do the job at my age. My answer to that is: I was doing the job,” he writes, adding that he saw no stronger Democratic candidate.
The former president calls it a “mistake” to have held a news conference in response to special counsel Robert Hur’s 2024 report on his handling of classified documents, a report that described him as a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
“If the Trump campaign had written the report itself, they couldn’t have come up with a line better designed to inflict maximum political damage,” Biden writes. He says Hur’s claim that he could not recall when his son Beau died infuriated him.
Biden attributes his debate performance in Atlanta partly to heavy travel and to the conviction of his son Hunter on three felony counts. He felt “awful—so bad I was tested for Covid,” he writes, noting the result was negative. He admits losing his train of thought on stage and expecting another opportunity. “I was wrong,” he says.
The memoir names veteran House Democrat Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer among those who pressed him to step aside. Pelosi, he writes, was “working furiously behind the scenes to get elected officials and Biden delegates to defect,” while Schumer came to his Rehoboth Beach home to urge him to withdraw. “Loyalty matters to me,” Biden writes.
He says he and Pelosi later mended their rift over lunch at an Italian restaurant.
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