The title of Jill Biden’s new memoir is View from the East Wing, but a more apt title might be Still Mad. Jill Biden is still mad, but unfortunately, Jill Biden is also still boring. She promises us a good time: “Only now can I stop to make sense of everything. It’s finally come time to sort through all that’s happened, for my own understanding, and for history”—lay it on me, sister—but just a page later: “And yet, I don’t want to spend too much energy looking back and asking how this could have happened.”
Isn’t that always the way with her? Industrious Jill Biden with her pastel knits, cheerleader enthusiasms, and endless grading of community college essays usually keeps a lid on things. Better to describe the table decorations at a White House Teacher Appreciation lunch in sadistic detail than let her hair down. She’s been a politician’s wife for almost half a century, and if her attention is no longer on the next campaign, it’s fixed on her husband’s legacy. Still, toward the end, the book provides a shimmer of what she thinks about the Democratic Party shanking her husband and the belief shared by many journalists that they were duped—by Jill Biden, among others—about the biggest story of the decade: President Biden’s obvious decline.
As we all remember, things happened very quickly after the June 2024 debate. The big revelation of the book is that when Jill saw Joe’s performance at the debate, she thought he was having a stroke. I didn’t experience it as catastrophic. I thought it was a representative example of how he regularly performed. At that point, fumbling answers, forgetting what he was talking about, and rallying with short-lived episodes of lucidity were regularly on display. Nothing was hidden from the public because you can’t hide that kind of thing. It had been clear long before the debate that he wasn’t fit for the biggest job in the world. He called the Ukrainians the Iranians, confused Angela Merkel with Helmut Kohl (dead since 2017), confused Emmanuel Macron with François Mitterrand (1996), and forgot the name of the prime minister of Australia and referred to him as “that fella down under.” He several times referred to Kamala Harris as “President Harris.” He said he’d campaigned in “54 states,” that “we have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean,” and that Nancy Pelosi had “helped rescue the economy in the Great Depression.”
