\tEvan Krape<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople in Washington know that Valerie Biden Owens is the most powerful woman in politics that most people have never heard of,\u201d says Deb Futter, publisher of Biden Owens\u2019s new memoir, Growing Up Biden. We do know her on some level\u2060\u2014she\u2019s the sister of the President; she shares his smile, name, and messaging. But could we spot her in a grocery store aisle? Do we know that she was one of the first women to run a Senate campaign and remains one of the closest people to our sitting leader? Are we aware that her ideas have shaped his platforms and her warmth helped raise his sons?Biden Owens has largely avoided press and participation in several major profiles written about her. Growing Up Biden is in many ways her true unveiling to the world. But at the book\u2019s core is a familiar Biden theme: the loyal, faithful family\u2014one that might seem too loving to be true if we hadn\u2019t seen the extent to which each member has been tested. The beating heart of President Biden\u2019s life and career has always been family. We\u2019ve seen it time and time again. The image of his 1973 Senate inauguration, held in the chapel of a Delaware hospital, remains indelible nearly 50 years later. His son, Beau, was still hospitalized with injuries from the car crash that killed Biden\u2019s wife and daughter only weeks earlier, and Biden refused to leave him or his brother. Through all the pain and victories, Valerie has been steadfastly by his side. \u201cYou can\u2019t share in the joys and then not share in the sorrows,\u201d Biden Owens tells ELLE.com. Growing Up Biden speaks to the Irish Catholic experience\u2014the large family, the joys, the heartbreaks\u2014but it also examines the life of a woman in politics. Writing it required a posture that felt unfamiliar to Biden Owens, she explains. \u201cThe part that was hard is [the attitude of] the Irish Catholic school kid who [is] never supposed to talk about me,\u201d she says, as we sit in the front room of the University of Delaware\u2019s Biden Center, where family photos spanning decades are displayed across the mantle, shelves, and tables. The focus on herself felt contrary to her beliefs and the way she was raised\u2014but it was the very intention of the book itself. \u201c\u2018And then I did this, and I\u2019m really important to my brother, and then I, I, I, I.\u2019 That was the hard part.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\tJoe, age four, and Valerie, one, visit their grandfather in his office at the\u00a0Scranton Tribune.
\n\tCourtesy of Valerie Biden Owens<\/p>\n
\t\tA seven-year-old Valerie, wearing her First Communion dress, stands alongside her brothers Joe and Jimmy.
\n\tCourtesy of Valerie Biden Owens<\/p>\n
When Joe Biden, then a lawyer and not yet 30 years old, decided to run in the 1972 Delaware Senate race, he turned to Biden Owens, his younger sister by three years, to manage his campaign. \u201cI said, \u2018Joey, I don\u2019t know anything about running a statewide campaign.\u2019 And he said, \u2018That\u2019s okay. We\u2019ll figure it out,\u2019\u201d she remembers. \u201cWhat we had to figure out is that we had no influence. We had no money. We had no power. We knew no one in power, and the Democratic Party in the state of Delaware was not very strong. We were a conservative state, and we didn\u2019t have the party to rely on.\u201d Biden Owens was a teacher, as was Biden\u2019s then-wife Neilia Hunter Biden. The voting age had recently been lowered to 18, and the youth were becoming increasingly politically engaged. \u201cI told my kids, my students, that they could learn about social studies and politics in the classroom, or they could come out and experience it firsthand,\u201d Biden Owens says. \u201cMy brother came to the school and spoke to an assembly, and he was young, vibrant.\u201d She describes producing makeshift newspapers in lieu of glossy campaign literature and recruiting teens to distribute them. In a year when Democrats were overwhelmingly defeated, Biden became a U.S. senator by just over 3,000 votes. Biden Owens credits the kids. <\/p>\n
\t\u201cHumiliation has a long shelf life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Relatively few people outside the Beltway recognize that Biden Owens, who ran each of her brother\u2019s Senate races and his 1988 and 2008 presidential bids, was one of the first female campaign managers. That doesn\u2019t concern her. \u201cI have plenty of recognition for it,\u201d she says. \u201cThe recognition I have for it is that Joe was elected. That\u2019s all the recognition I need. Even when I ran the Senate campaigns, [there were] very, very few female campaign managers. All the pundits were men. The reporters, with few exceptions, were all men. It was a man\u2019s playground, and women were relegated to opening and closing the headquarters and getting the coffee.\u201d Having a brother\u2014hers in particular\u2014running the show gave her a clear way in. \u201cMy brother pulled up a chair for me at the table, and literally our table was all men. He said, \u2018This is my sister. She speaks for me. If she says it, consider that\u2019s what we should do.\u2019 That made it a lot easier for me than a lot of other women who had to pull up a chair.\u201d The sibling relationship can offer a huge degree of security compared to the candidate-campaign manager relationship, Biden Owens insists. (Vice President Harris similarly turned to her younger sister Maya to chair her own 2020 run.) \u201cThe biggest asset is complete trust\u2026because of the trust that existed between us, my brother didn\u2019t have to worry about anything that happened back at the headquarters: what was going out, what was being said, what was being printed, what was the radio ad. He didn\u2019t have to worry about that. All he had to worry about was going out and being the best Joe Biden that he could be.\u201d <\/p>\n
\t\tValerie and Joe Biden in Delaware on election night in 1978, when Joe was re-elected to the Senate.
\n\tCOURTESY OF VALERIE BIDEN OWENS<\/p>\n
From her vantage point as one of the closest people to the President, Biden Owens has unique insight into his mind, both in and out of the Oval Office. What does she wish the public could see about her brother? \u201cI think one of the things that I read [that] is negative is if he falters on a word\u2014and he\u2019s a stutterer,\u201d she says. \u201cFrom the time he was a little boy, he stuttered. This kid, he couldn\u2019t string more than three words together at a time. So, I think when you see him pausing and the unpleasant people in this country, the right wing, Trump people say, \u2018Oh, look at him. He doesn\u2019t know what he\u2019s talking about,\u2019 it is remnants of when he was a kid and stuttered,\u201d she says. \u201cHumiliation has a long shelf life.\u201dThose who stutter will see themselves in the book. Biden Owens hopes that others will, too. Single fathers, the loved ones of addicts, those who\u2019ve lost someone to cancer, anyone who\u2019s grasped a parent, child, or sibling tightly as they struggled. (I personally connect with the embarrassment, the frustration, and isolation that comes with my own intermittent stutter.) \u201cI\u2019m a storyteller,\u201d she says. \u201cWhat would give me great pleasure is if a reader picks up the book and she says, \u2018Oh my God, that\u2019s me. She gets me. Oh, that sounds like my dad.\u2019 If there\u2019s a connection, that would give me a great deal of pleasure.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\u201cWe\u2019ve been in this business for a while. Politics is a noble profession, and I keep reminding myself of that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Creating compelling narratives was part of Biden Owens\u2019s work on the seven Biden Senate campaigns, as well as the career she pursued outside of that. For 20 years, she worked alongside Joe Slade White, who is credited with revolutionizing television campaign advertising through his work as a consultant for the Biden team, among other politicos. In 2014, she became a resident fellow at Harvard\u2019s Institute of Politics, creating a class called Politics: Up Close and Personal, which was comprised of six students who she taught at her apartment. She served as an advisor to the United Nations General Assembly from 2016 to 2017 and worked with Women\u2019s Campaign International. She also serves as the chair of the Biden Institute. But, she insists, it really all has been about Joe. \u201cMy number one job is raising an older brother,\u201d she says. \u201cI must say, I think I did a pretty good job.\u201dFor the 2020 presidential election, Jen O\u2019Malley Dillon served as Biden\u2019s campaign manager while Biden Owens worked as a national chair. Ceding the position was easy, she says. \u201cI am and always have been his best friend, his advisor, his confidante, and his sister, so we always talk, and we bounce ideas back and forth. But not being the campaign manager, I didn\u2019t have to wake up at 3 a.m. wondering if we got that ad out on time, or what the headquarters was doing in Nevada, or who was saying what, or what the headline was.\u201d <\/p>\n
\t\tA campaign postcard for the 1972 Senate race shows Joe and Neilia with Hunter, Naomi (\u201cAmy\u201d), and Beau in the living room of their home. There is a recipe for chicken casserole on the back of the card.
\n\tCourtesy of Valerie Biden Owens<\/p>\n
But the glee of the 2020 victory was quickly quelled by the realities of governing in an incredibly fraught era. Is it more difficult to handle the brutal barbs of politics today when the subject of them is a sibling you revere? \u201cJoe takes a hit a lot better than I do,\u201d Biden Owens says. \u201cJoe is a big boy, [a] strong politician. Joe says that politics is personal, but he doesn\u2019t take it personally. Sometimes I do,\u201d she says. \u201cIf somebody goes after your sibling or somebody you love or a child, yeah, it bothers me, but politics is an exchange, and sometimes it\u2019s harsh, but we\u2019re resilient. We\u2019ve been in this business for a while. Politics is a noble profession, and I keep reminding myself of that.\u201dSome days are harder than others. We\u2019re speaking shortly after a New York Times piece detailed the dissemination of Ashley Biden\u2019s diary by political operatives. Biden Owens is frank. They\u2019ll get through it. That\u2019s what they\u2019ve always done. \u201cLook, when you\u2019ve lost a child to glioblastoma, a 46-year-old young man who had the world in front of him, who\u2019s among the best human beings in the world, or when you have almost lost another child to addiction\u2026you can handle anything,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cMy brother was good. He shared his boys with us.\u201d<\/p>\n
She isn\u2019t referring to Beau, who died in 2015, and Hunter Biden, whose 2021 memoir Beautiful Things depicted his brutal battle with drugs and alcohol, as a typical aunt would, because, in so many ways, she is far from your typical aunt. Because she helped raise them, she considers her nephews more like her sons. \u201cTo be clear, yes, I did jump in and move in with my brother to help raise Beau and Hunt, but there was nothing heroic about it. It was the family code,\u201d she says, of the period following the deaths of Neilia and 13-month-old Naomi. \u201cMy brother gave a tremendous gift to me and my brothers Jimmy and Frankie in that he shared the children with us.\u201dBiden Owens was 27 years old when she became a de facto mother to the Biden children. \u201cI was with Joe in Washington, D.C., hiring staff, and the world turned upside down. It went off its axis,\u201d she recalls. The accident happened the week before Christmas. A home had been purchased in the nation\u2019s capital and the family was set to move in January. \u201cI said, \u2018Well, look, I\u2019ll come. I\u2019ll come in and stay until it\u2019s time to go.\u2019 And that\u2019s what we did. It was a tragic time, but it was a beautiful time. It was beautiful in that it\u2019s what family does. We came together, and we were together. We were even more together. And Beau and Hunter healed us. They healed my brother\u2019s heart.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\tBeau, Hunter, and Valerie playing in the backyard in fall 1973.
\n\tCourtesy of Valerie Biden Owens<\/p>\n
\u201cI was by no means a born-ready mom,\u201d she says. \u201cI figured that someday I\u2019d grow up and get married, and I\u2019d have children\u2014that\u2019s kind of a byproduct of getting married. It was an unhappy time in my life, and the boys healed all of us. For me, they broke my heart open again to love. Joe just said this on St. Patrick\u2019s Day\u2014he said that courage is the greatest of all virtues because, without it, you can\u2019t love with abandon. Well, Beau and Hunt broke open our hearts again, and we could love with abandon. Joe, within that five-year period, marrying Jill, me marrying [my husband] Jack, and then [our younger brother] Jimmy found [his wife] Sara. It was extraordinary.\u201d She talks about taking family trips in a Jeep. To her, they were magical.\u201cI\u2019m Aunt Val,\u201d explains Biden Owens, who has three children with her husband, John T. Owens. \u201cI remain very much in their lives. I\u2019m pretty darn sure of that. My eldest son, my only son by birth, his name is Cuffe. When Beau passed away in 2015, the whole family was devastated. My son said to me, \u2018Mommy, it\u2019s okay. Cry. You lost your firstborn.\u2019 So my brother was good. He shared his boys with us.\u201d Biden Owens brings up an oft-cited Biden line, \u201cFaith sees best in the dark,\u201d from S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard\u2019s Gospel of Sufferings, after I mention how my own faith was tested in the past two years\u2014albeit to a considerably minor degree than anything she\u2019s experienced\u2014and that my family stepped up in such a way that I came to see my parents in a new light. Upon hearing this, Biden Owens met my words with a level of compassion that left me stunned.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tGrowing Up Biden: A Memoir<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tValerie Biden Owens
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tbookshop.org<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t$25.76<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I\u2019ve learned, what I believe, is that adversity builds character more sharply than the spoils of victory,\u201d she starts. \u201cBeau died on May 30, 2015, and Pope Francis came to Washington in September of the same year. My daughter Casey and I went with Joe to the mass that he had outside the Basilica. The Pope\u2019s homily was, \u2018Keep moving forward. Moving forward.\u2019 I thought he was speaking directly to me and my brother, because that\u2019s what my brother has done. He gets up and keeps moving forward.\u201d In Growing Up Biden, Biden Owens seeks to illustrate the fundamental human elements that she believes tie a thread from the First family to all Americans. \u201cTragedy has struck our family, but it\u2019s hit every American family,\u201d she says. \u201cWe just happen to be in the public eye. It doesn\u2019t matter what the tragedy is. People walk around with holes in their heart and tears in their heart.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s about connections and the bond,\u201d she says. \u201c\u2018Empathy\u2019 is a fancy word, but it simply means \u2018to feel.\u2019 Not to feel as in to touch, but to feel as in absorbing the emotions of another person. To the extent that we can do that today, I think we\u2019re better off for it.\u201d <\/p>\n