Jill Biden says she’s unbothered by Democrats’ response to her memoir. In a backstage green room at the Miller Theater in Philadelphia on June 9, she flaps her mascaraed blue eyes and shakes her head, brushing off the last week of criticism, which was largely focused on the former First Lady’s admission that she feared her husband was having a stroke after his disastrous 2024 debate performance, despite publicly defending it at the time.
“I don't want to reopen the old wounds either. I mean, the debate was one chapter of 35 chapters,” Biden told TIME. “And could you imagine if I left that out? How I'd be criticized? Of course I had to include it. But do I want to relive it again and again and again? No. And I think the Democrats are going to do great in the midterms, and we'll go on and move past this time in history.”
We were speaking at the sixth stop on a book tour that some Democratic strategists and former Biden campaign staffers have excoriated for lacking self-reflection and dredging up a painful chapter for a party that needs to move forward. Biden says she wrote View from the East Wing because she wanted to offer her own version of the events surrounding an election that saw her husband step aside as the Democratic presidential nominee amid rising concerns over his fitness for office. View from the East Wing includes reflections on four years in the White House as First Lady—a period that included COVID, the start of the war in Ukraine, trips overseas, and initiatives to bolster women’s health and community colleges.
In the book’s most talked-about chapter, Biden recounts watching her husband on the presidential debate stage with Donald Trump and worrying that something was wrong—that he was having a stroke or was having a bad reaction to some medication. She says she accompanied President Biden to additional events afterward—a ballroom to greet volunteers and then a Waffle House in Atlanta—after doctors traveling with the team assured her he was OK. Jill Biden insists the decisions about whether her husband would run again—and, later, whether he would drop out—were ones she felt she had to stay out of, though she adds that she personally believed he could do the job.
“The truth was that he was not performing as well as he had in his younger days,” she wrote. “Did that disqualify him from being president, as long as he was getting the job done? I didn’t think so, nor did the staff members who were spending far more time with him than I was.”
In Philadelphia, a crowd of mostly women gave the former First Lady a warm standing ovation as she sat for a friendly conversation with Queer Eye's Antoni Porowski. But the broader reception has been more critical. Many Democrats have accused her of rewriting history, arguing the book is unhelpful and, at times, tone-deaf. The party is still reeling from its 2024 presidential loss. Much as Democrats say they want to move on, there remains a desire to find someone to blame—and to imagine an alternate history of the campaign. If Biden had pushed her husband, if she had spoken out, would things have played out differently? Several other books about 2024 portrayed the Bidens as insulated and stubborn. One way to read View from the East Wing is as a response to that criticism.
“It seems like an attempt to explain herself, except in doing so she’s only created more questions in the minds of the people reading it,” says Michael LaRosa, Jill Biden’s former press secretary. “I’ve never seen this level of criticism and outrage and just downright hostility leveled at a First Lady. Her judgment is just being questioned by everyone.”
Kellan White, who worked on the campaign in Pennsylvania, said the vitriol directed at Biden seemed misguided. “We’re two years out and we’re still debating what should have happened. We should be moving forward. I don’t think there needs to be this whole litigation over whether she’s a hero or a villain in the story.”
Political memoirs are rarely especially vulnerable or self-reflective. Expecting that from a First Lady known to be private and protective may be asking a bit much. The Bidens have lived through the death of one son, the addiction struggles of another, several brutal campaigns, and the klieg lights of a presidency. Jill Biden has said she developed a protective outer shell in the process. But the memoir still invites scrutiny for its apparent contradictions. Biden presents herself as a modern woman who wants to be known as the first First Lady to hold a full-time job in office, as a community college professor. At the same time, she describes an old-fashioned marriage in which she deferred to her husband on the biggest decisions and did not broach issues involving his health. The couple learned after leaving the White House that Biden had stage 4 prostate cancer, she says, something White House doctors did not catch. Biden says she did not press him on his health despite watching him get up multiple times a night to use the restroom.
The former First Lady was also widely known as a fierce advocate for her husband—a mama bear, she told me in a 2020 interview on the campaign trail. She grew up in a middle-class Philadelphia suburb and often told the story of punching a bully in the face for picking on her sister to illustrate her defensive instincts. But she says that when it came to Biden’s biggest decisions—whether to run again and whether to drop out later—she stayed out of it and went along with campaign advisers’ decisions.
Biden responded directly to her Democratic critics last week, urging detractors to call her and “say it to my face.” She told TIME it was “hurtful” to see longtime friends and allies publicly call for her husband to exit the race. I asked her if she thinks showing more candor at the time could have engendered more understanding.
“I don't know, I don't think the American people wanted to hear, you know, ‘oh my God, my husband did a terrible job,’” she says of the debate aftermath. “I mean, I couldn't do that. I have always been the stoic one. He wears his heart on his sleeve. You know what Joe's thinking any minute of the day. You know, we've been through a lot of joys, of course, but we've been through a lot of tragedies. And I think that my children and my grandchildren look to me to lean on. I just think I filled that role.”
Here are some excerpts from our conversation, edited lightly for clarity and brevity:
Why did you want to write the memoir? And why now?
I just wanted to give my reflections after we got out of office. So many people have written books. I think actually there have been like 20 written about the four years that Joe was president, and I just wanted to write my reflections.
Were there things you felt people got wrong about you or your role in 2024 that you were hoping this would clear up?
I just want to put my perspective on it, my reflections. I mean, I was in the rooms, I saw what happened, and you know, how I felt about those moments.
A much-talked about part of the book is when President Biden left the debate stage and you greeted him. You say he asked you, “I f—-d up, didn’t I?” and you responded “Yeah you did.” What went through your mind as you watched that debate?
I was scared to death. I thought, ‘Oh my God, what's happening? Is this a stroke?’ And I kept watching. Things got a little bit better with the debate, but not that much. And then afterwards, I went out and I greeted him, and I tried to assess immediately, like, you know, what's going on, is he okay? And once he said that to me, you know, I knew he was fine. And then I went to the green room to pick up all my stuff. He went to meet with his staff, and the staff of doctors were there, and so the doctor said to me, ‘He's fine, he's fine.’ And then we went on, and we did three events that night.
You say you’d never seen anything like that from him and still don’t have an explanation for what happened. Does he have theories?
Yeah, he feels that he was over-tired, traveling around the world. And you know, it's sort of inexplicable, because I never saw anything like that, and, and then afterwards, like I said, he was the same old Joe.
Some people involved in the campaign have described the former president's inner circle as being a bubble. Did you feel that way during the summer of 2024? Looking back, are you confident that you were getting an accurate picture of what people were saying?
Oh my God, yeah. I mean, Joe watches news shows constantly. I mean, at times I have to say, "turn it off, turn it off.” So he was getting a really accurate picture of what was going on.
What about the polling and the input you were getting from advisers?
We were hearing both things, like “stay in, stay in,” and then we were hearing, you know, “you have to get out.” People weren't of one mind. Everybody had, of course, his or her own opinion, but ultimately it was Joe's decision.
You talk a lot about the role of the First Lady being a Catch-22. You say you could be accused of being a puppeteer one moment, and then of not speaking up loudly enough the next. How did you navigate those two expectations?
They said, “Oh, she went to cabinet meetings.” I didn't go to cabinet meetings. I went to one cabinet meeting and introduced the Women's Health Initiative. I didn't partake in Joe's office. He was in the West Wing. I was in the East Wing. But then, you know, if you did too little, it was like you weren't doing enough. I think all First Ladies deal with that. But my belief is that each Ffirst Lady does it her own way. Laura Bush did it entirely differently than her mother-in-law, Barbara Bush. I think Hillary Clinton certainly did it in an entirely different way. Some had children in the White House, and some didn't. Our roles were all completely different. My children were grown. I was a grandmother. I was a working woman.
President Biden announced at one of your events that he has a book coming out, too. When will that be released?
Later than this month, and within the year.
How is his health?
It’s prostate cancer. If you know any man who's had it, they can cure that, but the fact that it's metastasized to his bones, he's going to live with cancer the rest of his life. That means medications. He had five-and-a-half weeks of radiation, and it takes a toll, and he's 83. It's really changed the trajectory of our life in a lot of ways. I was thinking, “Oh, we'll travel to, you know, Iceland, we'll do all these things.” But I don't know. Is that really fair? I mean, if he's 83 and has Stage Four cancer, I don't know. It just changes what’s important.
Last time we sat down, we talked about your protective instincts and you described yourself as a mama bear. When you look back on the last four years, do you feel like you protected President Biden? Do you feel like you protected his legacy? Are those two different things?
I mean, in the book, I just told the truth. I don't think I was in any sort of protection mode. I wanted to be honest in my book, tell exactly what happened, and so I don't feel that I was protecting him. Everything was sort of out there in public. That summer, after the debate, I was just a little shaken. I wasn't protective of him. I just couldn't figure out what was going on.
What do you hope that the Biden legacy will be?
I hope that people know, and I think that they will, that Joe wanted to be president to help the American people, to make their lives better. And I feel that he did do that in all the legislation he passed, and how he worked across the aisle. And I think you know he worked hard for the working class, he worked hard for labor to lift them up, and I think that's going to be his legacy, of taking us through really tough times.
