The World According to Biden

Inside the President’s efforts to sustain the American century

- By Massimo Calabresi. Photograph by Philip Montgomery

BIDEN IN THE OVAL OFFICE IN MAY 28

In the Cabinet Room, with sun pouring through French doors from the Rose Garden outside, he remembers the first time he sat around the long mahogany table, its highbacked leather chairs ordered by seniority. It was more than 50 years ago, Biden says, and Richard Nixon told National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to brief the 30-year-old first-term Delaware Senator on the still secret timing of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Walking slowly through the halls, the President unspools anecdotes about heads of state: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Emmanuel Macron. In the Oval Office, he talks about his childhood home in Scranton, Pa., and the 2008 phone call from Barack Obama asking Biden to be his running mate.

Biden recounts these memories over the course of more than 90 minutes on a warm spring day, speaking in a quiet, sometimes scattershot way. The impression he gives is one of advancing age and broad experience, of a man who has lived history. Biden leads the U.S. as the American century is fading into an uncertain future, a changing world of threats, opportunities, and power shifts. At 81, he holds fast to a vision that has reigned since World War II, in which a rich and powerful America leads an alliance of democracies to safeguard the globe from tyranny.

On June 6, Biden would travel to Normandy, France, to memorialize an event that has served for eight decades as a focal point of this vision. He will arrive as the 12th-and certainly the last-American President who was alive on that day in 1944, when 73,000 American troops led the largest amphibious invasion in human history, accelerating Nazi Germany's defeat and Europe's liberation. For generations, D-Day has been a hallowed anniversary. The President says commemorating it is as much about the future as the past. "We're playing [that role] even more," Biden says. "We are the world power."