“Most of the people who went through what I went through are either dead or in prison,” said Hunter Biden to “CBS This Morning” co-host Anthony Mason.
In Biden’s new memoir, “Beautiful Things”, he addresses his lifelong battle with addiction and his family’s efforts to save him from himself.
He said that the anxiety and trauma he experienced as a child, with the death of his mother and one-year-old sister, contributed to pushing him to alcohol and crack – and it was a blind date with his future wife that rescued him.
Hunter’s battle with addiction began with a feeling of loneliness that he said he felt since he was a child: “It’s the feeling of never fitting in. It’s that hole. And you don’t know exactly what it is.”
Mason asked, “Where do you think that feeling came from?”
“I am more convinced now that trauma is at the heart of it all.”
“What trauma – the loss of your mother?”
“Yes. Absolutely. And I don’t know why I had such a hard time admitting it.”
Biden’s mother, Neilia Biden, and her one-year-old sister, Naomi, died in a car accident in 1972. He and his older brother, Beau, only two and three years old at the time, were seriously injured, but they survived . Their father, Joe, was sworn in for his first term as a senator beside his bed at the hospital.
“I think there is now a lot of research that points to the idea that almost all addicts addicted have serious trauma in their lives,” said Hunter.
In his book, Hunter writes, “Beau and I never really suffered the loss of our mother or baby sister.”
“Didn’t you talk to your dad about this, too?” asked Mason
“We talked about my mom all the time with my dad. But the real accident, no,” he replied. “The darkness that I know my father suffered after was not something that we necessarily talked about until much later.”
“Would you like to have it now?”
“No. And this is where I am … it’s difficult. That’s why I don’t want to admit that we probably should have. I think they were trying to protect us,” he said.
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The book chronicles Biden’s lifelong struggles with alcohol and cocaine. At one point, he managed to stay clean for more than seven years. But when Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, Hunter began a four-year descent in the darkest period of his addiction, what he calls “a blur of complete and utter debauchery”.
“Drinking a pint of vodka a day alone in a room is absolutely, completely debilitating,” Hunter told Mason, adding that “he smoked crack all the time” and “drank insanely lethal amounts of alcohol.”
In 2019, he became a target of the Trump campaign, and yet Hunter said, “It hasn’t changed my behavior in any way. I still needed to get high. I still needed to hide. I still needed to fill that hole.”
While his father was planning a presidential race, Hunter, who left behind three daughters and a failed marriage, was living in roadside motels, chasing his next fix.
Then the family planned a dramatic intervention, disguised as an invitation to a family dinner.
Mason asked, “Why did you agree to go?”
“My mom said she missed me. ‘Dad,’ she said, ‘Dad really, really needs you, dear.”
“But weren’t you really in a position to go?”
“No. And I went in and there were my three daughters, my niece and nephew, my mom and dad, and two counselors from a rehab center that I had been to before. And I looked and said, ‘No way. no way.'”
“Did you explode?”
“It blew up, literally started running up the sidewalk.”
“And did your father chase you?”
“Yes, and he grabbed me in a hug. And he grabbed me. [Gives me a] bear hug. And he said, and he just cried and said, ‘I don’t know what to do. I do not know what to do. ‘”
“What did you think when you heard that?”
“I thought, ‘I need to find a way to tell him that I’m going to do something so I can take another drink,'” recalls Hunter. “It was the only thing I could think of. I don’t know a force more powerful than the love of my family, except addiction.
“I said I would get help. I booked the next flight to Los Angeles and decided it was going to disappear completely forever.”
But before he disappeared, Hunter agreed to give The New Yorker an interview. He said, “But it is part of what saved me. I started to tell my story.”
Mason said, “A lot of people looked at that New Yorker article and thought, ‘Why are you doing this to your dad now?'”
“Yes. And I looked at it like I was going to take the ammunition from them,” said Hunter. “The only thing I thought they would try to use against [my dad] it was my drug addiction, this idea that I was addicted to crack ”.
“Did you want to release it before they could use it against you and your father?”
“Yes, exactly, exactly. And nobody in the campaign knew who I was. Because I knew they would say no.”
What happened next, Biden calls a “miracle”.
On a blind date, he met Melissa Cohen, an aspiring filmmaker from South Africa. They had an instant connection.
“And then I told her an hour later, I said, ‘I’m a crack addict,'” said Hunter.
“And didn’t she run away?”
“She said, ‘Well, that’s over now.'”
Mason asked, “Did you think it was your last chance?”
“Yes, me you knew it was my last chance. “
Just seven days later, they were married. Last year, her son, Beau, was born.
With Melissa’s help, Hunter Biden began to repair the damage. One of the deepest wounds in his family: the case he had with his brother’s widow, Hallie, shortly after Beau’s death.
Mason asked, “A lot of people look at this and think, ‘What were you thinking about?’ What they were You are thinking?”
Hunter replied, “We both went through the most incredibly painful loss. And it was out of love. And I thought maybe that love would bring my brother back. And it didn’t work.”
“In the middle of it, did you think about how your own children would see this?”
“Yes. And it was difficult. That’s all I can say. It was very difficult.”
In the nearly two years he said he was sober, Hunter Biden tried to make amends. The most difficult repair to make, he said, was for his brother.
“Why couldn’t you do this in person?” asked Mason.
“I made a promise to him that I would be, I would be fine.”
“Did you feel that you let him down?”
“Yes.”
“So, how do you make it up to this?”
“Live every day in honor of that,” he replied. “Having a purpose and serving other people. I know what I need to do.”
“Beautiful Things” will be published on Tuesday by Gallery Books, a brand of Simon & Schuster (a division of ViacomCBS).
For more information on Anthony Mason’s interview with Hunter Biden Click here.
To watch Tracy Smith’s interview with Hunter Biden on “CBS Sunday Morning” Click here.