Page 15 of 107 Days
Minyon’s task benefited, in the end, by the Biden team’s failure to engage with her to nail down Joe’s convention theme. She was free to order up graphics for my theme: FOR THE PEOPLE, FOR OUR FUTURE .
For the program, we had to figure out what to keep and what to throw out from what had been planned for Joe.
Some of it was a given: there are large procedural segments, there will always be elected officials and union leaders and some celebrities.
Anyone running for office lobbies hard for a speaking slot in prime time.
In this case, they would need to be slotted in before Joe Biden’s speech on night one, the vice presidential nominee’s on night two, and my acceptance speech on the final night. Each of us would have friends and family speaking as our lead-ins.
We needed to tell my story in the production, and one aspect I wanted to highlight was my work as AG. I think that the elected attorneys general are some of the most talented and dedicated officials in the country, and I wanted to throw a spotlight on them as well.
The convention exists on two planes at the same time.
It must work for the delegates in the hall—those committed community leaders from every state and every walk of life who live and breathe Democratic politics—and also for the television audience, who may have only just started to focus on the election as they deal with their daily responsibilities.
I believe it is also in the party’s interest to highlight our stars, while we make it as entertaining as possible.
When I became VP, I had a secret project—I called it the Stars Project—that only my senior team knew about.
We’d brainstorm about the younger talents in the party and then, on Friday afternoons, I’d invite one or another to visit my office in the West Wing or the residence.
As I’d offer a seat on the couch across from me, more than one nervously confessed: “I feel like I’ve been called into the principal’s office.
” I would laugh and say, “No, I think you’re very talented.
What are you working on, and how can I help you? ”
Many of those on my list spoke at the convention: Lauren Underwood, Robert Garcia, Angela Alsobrooks, Lateefah Simon, Maxwell Frost, Joe Neguse, Lina Hidalgo, Jasmine Crockett.
Stephanie Cutter, a trusted adviser and veteran strategist, aided by Reggie Hudlin, my best friend Chrisette’s award-winning filmmaker husband, had started pulling together the short biographical video usual for the vice president, but now that I was top of the ticket we had to scramble to find much more material.
This video and my speech would be my introduction to the large numbers of people who had just tuned into the campaign and really didn’t know who I was.
I would finally have control of the podium to reclaim my narrative and my identity.
Early that evening I got a call from Joe.
For months, I’d been working on delicate negotiations to bring home former US marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich from their unjust imprisonment in Russia.
While attending the Munich Security Conference in February, I’d used the opportunity to arrange private meetings with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob.
Germany had in custody the inmate of most value to Vladimir Putin, the assassin Vadim Krasikov, who had killed a Chechen separatist in Berlin.
Slovenia had two other Russians of interest to Putin; Poland and Norway each had one.
It was a chess game, with many states’ interests in play.
Chancellor Scholz is a serious, thoughtful man who weighed his options carefully.
As with all the European heads of state, there was a heightened sense of the threat Putin represented.
Eastern Europeans, especially, had experienced oppression under the kind of Greater Russia that Putin romanticized and yearned to re-create.
There was also a melancholy sense that the United States was not the ally it had once been.
Trump’s first term had proven that our leadership of NATO, the world’s greatest military alliance, was not constant and might be fleeting.
Their knowledge of what happened in the 1930s is far greater than what they perceive ours to be.
They can feel it in their blood and in their bones.
And they legitimately fear we might abandon them.
When I would say, “America is back,” they would say, “For how long?” I always reassured them, while silently praying that what I said would remain true.
It was no small ask of Chancellor Scholz to release a murderer serving a life sentence.
But he was motivated by the possibility of securing the release of Alexei Navalny, the leading opposition figure in Russia, who had been saved from Russian poisoning by German doctors, before bravely returning to Russia knowing he’d be imprisoned.
A small team at the NSC and the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs at the State Department had worked around the clock on the details of this complex negotiation, never forgetting for a minute that lives were at stake—as we tragically learned.
Just before I was due to speak at the Munich Security Conference, we received dreadful news: Navalny was dead in his icy gulag, almost certainly murdered.
I began my speech expressing deep sorrow for his death, saying it was another instance of Putin’s brutality.
“Whatever story they tell, let us be clear: Russia is responsible.”
Navalny’s widow, Yulia, had not been scheduled to speak at the conference, but she arrived, red-eyed and heartbroken, and took the podium after I spoke, giving a courageous call for resistance.
The killing of Navalny made me even more motivated to achieve this prisoner swap, even though the chessboard had just been so violently overturned.
Now, Joe was calling to say the pieces were finally moving into place. It looked like we’d soon be able to tell the families of Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich that their ordeal was finally over.