Page 1 of 107 Days

“Auntie! Auntie!”

A small fist rapped gently on my bedroom door.

I’d flown in late the night before from a campaign event of a thousand people at a packed hall in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Organizers had made a huge-lettered, rainbow-colored sign, VPTOWN , for my event, but there was both energy and tension in the crowd.

Joe Biden’s debate with Donald Trump, three weeks earlier, had thrown the campaign into chaos, and I’d had to fend off supporters’ anxious questions.

I threw on sweatpants and an old Howard University sweatshirt and pulled up my hair in a ponytail. I’d promised bacon and sausage with the pancakes, but before that I needed my half hour on the elliptical.

I’d stopped watching the Sunday-morning shows: no more endless rhetoric about the president’s capability. I turned on the cooking channel. The chef was making an elaborate dessert, which captivated Amara, eight, and her sister, Leela, six.

The girls had spent the week with me at the vice president’s residence—the sprawling Queen Anne–style house on the grounds of Washington’s Naval Observatory.

They’d be leaving that afternoon, heading back to Palo Alto, California, ahead of the new school year.

After breakfast and a wash of greasy hands, we sat on the rug by the coffee table to do a big jigsaw puzzle together while their mom, my niece, and their dad went upstairs to pack.

And that’s where I was when my secure phone rang, at eleven minutes past one.

I glanced at the screen. Caller ID blocked. Only about a dozen people had my secure number. Of those few, only one came up blocked. I unfolded my legs, stood up, and walked around the corner to my office.

“Hi, Joe,” I said.

“I need to talk to you.” He was calling from his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he’d gone to isolate after testing positive for Covid four days earlier. His voice sounded hoarse, exhausted. “I’ve decided I’m dropping out.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I’m going to announce in a few minutes.”

“Why today?”

“It’s the only thing anyone is talking about. And it’s too much. There’s going to be another letter from Democratic members of Congress on Monday. It’s too much.”

Really? Give me a bit more time. The whole world is about to change. I’m here in sweatpants, and the two people staffing me right now are under four feet tall.

I put the phone on mute and went back to Amara and Leela. Eyes wide, eyebrows raised, voice urgent: “Go get your parents!”

My husband, Doug, was in Los Angeles, trapped by the global CrowdStrike software glitch that had grounded many flights. My sister, Maya, was in New York. I needed to start alerting the family before this story broke.

The president was still talking. “I want you to do this.” He would endorse me, he said, but not for a day, maybe two, when he would make an address to the nation.

That would be ruinous, and I said so.

“Joe, I’m honored, but we live in a twenty-four-hour news cycle, and if you wait that long, the airwaves will be full of nothing but questions: ‘Why has he not supported his VP?’ If you want to put me in the strongest position, you have to endorse me now.

” I urged him to reconsider the timing. “What we do, right now, is so important,” I said.

“People will look at how this moment occurred for decades. There’s no reason to rush this.

Can we slow it down so I can prepare? And you need to endorse me at the same time.

Any gap between the announcement and the endorsement will lead to the same kind of chaos we’ve had for the last three weeks. ”

The public statements, the whispering campaigns, and the speculation had done a world of damage.

I knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win.

The most qualified and ready. The highest name recognition.

A powerful donor base. And I also knew, as he did, that I was the only person who would preserve his legacy.

At this point, anyone else was bound to throw him—and all the good he had achieved—right under the bus.

Joe’s two closest aides, Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon, were in the room with him in Rehoboth. He put Ricchetti on the phone. “We were always going to support you. We just want to do this announcement first and leave a little bit of time.”

“Steve, you know that’s not going to work,” I said. “There needs to be no daylight between the announcements.”

“That’s a fair point,” Steve conceded. He gave the phone back to the president.

Joe said, “Let me call you back.”

I waited, hoping I’d convinced them to avoid more turmoil and speculation. He’d resisted this decision for weeks, adamantly ignoring a drumbeat that had ranged from solicitous advice to intense condemnation.

Amid all that cacophony, Joe had said nothing to me about this, until July 15.

It was two days after the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

We were in the Situation Room, at a briefing on the investigation into the shooting.

Joe was at the head of the table, as always.

I sat to his right. As the meeting concluded, the president thanked everyone and rose to leave.

I’m a stickler for protocol, as I believe everyone at the White House should be.

I sit only after the president sits, stand when he stands.

As everyone else began to file out, Joe turned to me. “Do you have a minute, can you stay?”

Soon we were alone, dwarfed by the long table at which so many momentous decisions had been made. The screens on the walls had all gone dark, except for the red digital clocks showing the time in current conflict zones.

“If for any reason I had to drop out, I would support you, but only if that’s what you want. It’s occurred to me I haven’t asked you.” He’d clearly rehearsed this speech, it wasn’t a spontaneous thought, and it was the first time I knew he was seriously considering it.

The calls for him to drop out, he said, would probably continue. People were throwing his own words back at him, that he had said he would be a transitional leader.

“I’m fully behind you, Joe,” I told him. “But if you decide not to run, I’m ready. And I would give it all I’ve got, because Trump has to be beaten.”

There had been no follow-up discussion. In our relationship, it was common for him to test out ideas on me, and until he decided, I had no reason to believe it would actually happen.

All his public statements remained defiant declarations that only “the Lord Almighty” could make him drop out. Then he came down with Covid.

But still, no word. As nearly a week passed, I had come to accept the inevitability that he was staying in the race, that the time for him to make a different decision had passed.

Now here he was, on the phone, telling me otherwise.