“I wish to hell I’d just kept saying the exact same thing”

It contained the speech he had given at the Democratic National Convention in July. He told me he had been rereading it. He began reciting aloud: “If you live in neighborhoods like the one Jill and I grew up in, if you worry about your job and getting decent pay. …” His voice accelerated. “If you worry about your children’s education, if you’re taking care of an elderly parent, there’s only one person in this race who. …” He looked up at me and sighed. “I wish to hell I’d just kept saying the exact same thing.”

Biden was afflicted with regret. He was sorry that, on the campaign trail, he had spoken so often about Donald Trump’s unfitness for office and not enough about what Hillary Clinton would do for the middle class. He was sorry he didn’t push harder inside the White House for a middle-class tax cut. And he was still torn over his decision not to run for president, a race that he said would have been “brutal” but that he also believed he could have won…

On his deathbed, Beau advised his father to run, but many friends — including President Obama — didn’t think he was up to it emotionally, and the vice president finally agreed. “For all that’s important to me in almost a sacred sense,” he told me mournfully, the decision was unavoidable. “The family was broken, and I was more broken than I thought I was.” How broken? “I don’t know what I’d do if I was in a debate and someone said, ‘You’re doing this because of your son,’ ” he told me one late November day in his West Wing office. “I might have walked over and kicked his ass.”