On Thursday, in his long-awaited and long-awaited initial press conference as president, Joe Biden tried to traffic not in the spasms of news cycles, but in the overarching arcs of history, inserting everything from economic dislocation to recalcitrant actions by Congress the current wave of migrants on the Mexican border into the broader context of presidential and even epic ebbs and ebbs.
This week, so early in his term in the Oval Office, marked not just another stark contrast to his predecessor – Donald Trump, in equal parts distortion of history and disgust. With Biden, 78, being lampooned as decrepit by some of the loudest voices on the right, particularly after stumbling on Air Force One stairs, he is really leaning towards a projection of age-acquired wisdom to express a broader view of history. That prospect, he hopes, will imbue his ambitious agenda with an energy that could put him (if successful) in a category of presidents with surprising consequences.
It was true from the start on Thursday, when The Associated Press’s Zeke Miller asked about immigration reform, gun control, voting rights and climate change.
“Long-term problems,” said Biden in his response. “They’ve been around for a long time.”
That in itself could have sounded like an excuse. Biden struggled to signal the opposite. He introduced himself as the person who was “hired” to gather his long experience in trying to solve intractable problems.
“The elder has the perspective of history,” Russel Riley, co-president of the presidential oral history program at the University of Virginia, told me.
“The challenges he faces are daunting and great challenges are great times for ambitious presidents, and I think he is visionary enough to seize the moment,” said presidential historian Mark Updegrove. “At the same time, it seems so anomalous considering what we’ve been experiencing for four years, that in many ways it felt like eight or 12 because of the rapidity of news cycles and all the chaos and agitation of events surrounding the Trump administration. “
Trump, of course, was and is the antithesis of a history student. He did not read and did not read presidents’ biographies (and said so), even when he tried to become one. “I don’t have much time,” he explained. “I never have.” During his four years in office, he propagated and commissioned (at best) easy interpretations of America’s past. The main way in which Trump got involved in the presidential annals was the recurring, self-chlorinated way in which he compared himself to Abraham Lincoln.
Biden, on the other hand, recently spoke to prominent historians to explore his knowledge. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (and his New Deal) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (Great Society) may end up being the closest parallels of the past 100 years to the Biden era “in terms of transforming the country in important ways in a short space of time”, Michael Beschloss, one of the participants, told Mike Allen of Axios.
From FDR and LBJ, the most compelling comparison may be the last one, based on conversations I recently had with presidential historians. Some of the similarities: Longtime creatures of the Capitol. Experienced operators, more than loud speakers. And unexpected presidents – and in difficult and tumultuous times that have doubled as rare opportunities.
“It is important to learn from what has worked and what has not worked in the past and get the perspective of the people who study it,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters earlier this week. “It is to have an open conversation,” she said of the meeting with historians, “about the challenges … our country is facing and looking at history. And it is a time to take a step back and reflect and use it as lessons for the future. “
Thursday’s 62-minute press conference in the East Room of the White House took place remarkably in the same space as Biden’s meeting with more than half a dozen high-profile historians.
Reporters’ questions tended, perhaps, in a predictable way to the present. Of the 10 called Biden, compiled by my colleague Theodoric Meyer, half of them asked about immigration. Three asked about the obstruction. There were two more questions about the 2024 presidential campaign (2) than about Covid-19 (0). (“Are reporters missing the big picture and historical nature of Biden’s agenda?” Asked Brian Stelter of CNN.) In any case, Biden answered the questions predominantly du-jour in practically tectonic terms, consistently evoking fewer cycles ( news or elections) as the vast patterns of centuries and generations.
“I believe we should return to a position on the obstruction that existed only when I came to the United States Senate 120 years ago,” he said in response to a question from PBS Yamiche Alcindor, trying to make a joke about his age. (Biden, for the record, was elected from Delaware to the upper house, not in 1901, but in 1972.)
It has historically become granular very quickly. “Between 1917 and 1971 – the obstruction existed – there were a total of 58 motions to break an obstruction all the time. Last year alone, it was five times more. Therefore, it is being abused in a gigantic way, ”he said. “It used to be you had to sit there and talk and talk and talk and talk until you passed out. And guess what? People got tired of talking and passing out. The obstructionists broke … ”
He went from historian to prognosticator. “Look, I predict for you, your children or grandchildren will do your doctoral thesis on the question of who did it: autocracy or democracy? Because that is what is at stake – not just with China. Look around the world. We are in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution with enormous consequences. Will there be a middle class? How will people adjust to these significant changes in science and technology and the environment? How will they do this? And are democracies equipped? ”He said in response to a question from Justin Sink at Bloomberg.
“This,” said Biden, “is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.”
And in response to another question about immigration, this one by Janet Rodriguez from Univision, Biden cited the genealogy of his own family and the despair that drove America’s growth – with an anecdote humanizing migrants and justifying the asylum process while telling the while not everyone enters and not everyone can stay, even if they want or deserve it.
“People don’t want to leave” from their homes, he said. “When my great-grandfather boarded a coffin ship in the Irish Sea” – for a generation, he was referring to his maternal great-great-grandfather Owen Finnegan, a White House spokesman told me – “the expectation was: he will live long enough on that ship to reach the United States of America? But they left because of what the British were doing. They were in real, real trouble. They didn’t want to leave. But they had no choice. “
“He kind of dealt with all these issues, so naturally he understands that not everything is new and everything has roots,” said Princeton historian Julian Zelizer, referring to Biden’s 36 years in the Senate and two terms in the House Branca as vice president. “I think it’s a little comforting for many Americans to be able to see someone again, even if they’re still nervous about the conditions we’re in, even if they don’t necessarily support him – but someone who has some sense of it. “
“Donald Trump could never think beyond a certain moment,” added Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson. “It is very different.”
“The contrasts with Trump are obviously ubiquitous,” John Woolley, co-director of the American Presidency Project, told me in an email. “Part of that contrast for him is reminding us that he has an informed, not simplistic, long-term view.”
Biden’s one-off deviation from this long-term view was not about the past, but about the future. Pressed by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins about whether he will run for re-election, Biden contested.
“I am a great respect for fate,” he said, reiterating a phrase he said many times over many years. “I was never able to plan … three and a half years ahead, for sure.”
He culminated his responses to Collins’ line of questioning with the use (three times) of a word that again evoked time in a much broader way. “I want to change the paradigm,” he said. “I want to change the paradigm. We started to reward work, not just wealth. I want to change the paradigm. “
The fact that FDR and LBJ were on the air here at the beginning of this presidency is an unlikely turnaround at this stage in Biden’s life, which has traditionally been considered more intermediate, practical rather than aggressively progressive. For many historians and political analysts with whom I spoke, it is, at least for the time being, a function of the moment rather than of man. If nothing else, they suggest, these comparisons are premature. After all, Biden has been president for just over two months. But that does not mean that these conversations are not worthwhile.
On Thursday night, about six hours after Biden’s press conference ended, I called Jeffrey Engel, the founding director of the Presidential History Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. We talked about the disparate chapters of history, but also about their connective tissue.
FDR was elected president in 1932. LBJ was elected to Congress in 1937, was elected to the Senate in 1948 and became president, of course, on November 22, 1963, and held office until January 1969. And no exactly four years later, Biden was elected to the Senate.
“FDR put LBJ under his protection and used to play poker with him when he was a young congressman. LBJ entered the inner circle in his early years, as a young congressman in DC FDR was his personal hero. And Biden is there at the end, if you like, of the broad Johnson era, or at least the effect of Johnson’s policies, ”said Engel.
“Biden comes to the Senate at the age of 30 and obviously has so many tragedies going on at that time too,” he continued, referring to the car accident that killed his wife and daughter and injured his two sons, “and each person in the Senate he wanted to be his mentor – and they had all spent time with LBJ or FDR. “
It is this chronology, the emergence of the possibility of this epic three-stage lineage, from Depression to the pandemic, that highlights how Engel sees and hears Biden now. “I hear when he talks about the moment of delivery. When Biden talks about work, you can close your eyes and imagine a New Dealer, ”he said.
“Biden knows,” concluded Engel, “that there are only two or three moments in life that really matter to make a structural difference. And he is sitting in the middle of one. I am not surprised that he is thinking about generational change. “