Joe Biden used to drive me crazy. I was put off by his mix of volubility and imprecision. But during his time as Obama’s sidekick, I began picking up on something in his descants I hadn’t heard before. I’m not sure if it was Biden or me who wised up, but I do think our ex-VP learned something from observing Obama’s more daring rhetorical moves—namely, don’t try this yourself. Where he once offered himself as a worldly sophisticate with complex views—he ran in 2007-8 as a foreign policy wonk—he’s now intent on cultivating a common touch. Plain Joe isn’t an inauthentic pose. It seems closer to his core than his now ditched Biden-the-Mandarin imaging. I’m reminded on this score of an anecdote about Biden told by Paul Berman a few years back (in the course of a tribute to Vaclav Havel), which underscores Biden’s knack for demotic talk and clarity about simple American truths.
Berman bumped into Biden in 1996 at a Prague castle, Hradschin, where Berman had gone on assignment from the New York Times to interview Havel. He had trouble, though, getting admitted to see the President of the Czech Republic and in the meantime met Biden—then chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee—who was on his way in to see Havel. Berman tagged along, enabling him to take some notes on Biden that seem worth recalling today.
Berman’s account of Biden’s encounter with Havel, which you can read below, not only hints at Biden’s unobvious strengths as a communicator, it reminds one that when it comes to evaluating “conjoint communicated experience” (democracy’s essence, per John Dewey), first thoughts are rarely best thoughts…B.D.
…[Biden] was more than delighted to pump the hand of anyone on assignment for the New York Times Magazine. Biden’s skin glistened. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee was there with a little party of Americans, including the American ambassador and an interpreter and an aide or two, and he and his party were ushered into the Castle for their audience with the president. And since Biden had evidently conceived a fondness for me, I saw no reason to abandon our budding friendship now. Wordlessly I tiptoed after the senator into the Castle, quite as if I, too, had been invited. The five or six of us trooped along a corridor, up a wide stone stairway, and through vast feudal galleries lined with vertical windows that overlooked Prague and an enormous sky and, even so, appeared to admit scarcely any light, as if the medieval duty of those ancient windows was to maintain a decorous gloom. Just now I have read a description of the Castle by the French writer Chateaubriand, who visited the place in 1833 in the course of concocting a royalist plot, and I see that, from the 1830s to the 1990s, not much changed, apart from the candles. The corridors and the stairways and the sparseness of furniture reminded Chateaubriand of prisons and monasteries, and those same precincts reminded Biden of the Pentagon, or so he remarked as we trod the halls. Such was the interior of the cupcake.
Havel awaited us in his meeting room, together with a cagey-looking adviser, one of his cabinet ministers, and an interpreter. His skin did not glisten. Biden gave an impression of being taller than he was, and Havel, the opposite impression. Everyone took a seat at a long table—the officials, the aides, the interpreters, and I, the non-speaking trespasser, busy taking notes, whose presence no one questioned. The agenda of the meeting was delicate. The question was NATO, and whether the military alliance should expand into the former zones of the Warsaw Pact by admitting the Czech Republic.
For a brief moment during the Velvet Revolution, Havel seemed to take the view that, in a post-1989 world, his country ought to avoid getting involved in the battle of the superpowers and stay away from NATO. But his thinking had evidently evolved. He had come to believe that his tiny Czech Republic ought to join NATO as a full member (and in later years he insisted that he had never thought otherwise, and always yearned to enlist in NATO). Enlisting in NATO was not a popular proposition among ordinary Czechs in 1997. Czech instincts had always tended toward neutralism, pacifism, and generally the policy of giving no offense, which was not a bad policy during the later years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There was even a short period after World War I when the Czechs succeeded in ruling themselves, together with their neighbors the Slovaks. Over the centuries, though, the inoffensive Czechs had mostly been ruled by everybody but Czechs. Prague is an architectural marvel today because, when the Nazis invaded, the citizenry wished to avoid enraging the Germans, which meant putting up no resistance; and Prague’s architecture achieved an excellent survival rate. In regard to NATO, ordinary Czechs wondered, why enrage the Russians? In 1997 the Russian ambassador threatened to cut off the Czech Republic’s access to natural gas if the Czechs joined NATO. Even so, Havel was pro-NATO.
Senator Biden admired Havel’s position. Everybody was of one mind. Still, Biden had something to add. It was a matter of enthusiasm, and of funding. Joining NATO was going to require the integration of military forces and technologies and the offering of military guarantees, and all of this was going to be terribly expensive. Biden explained that, even in Poland, where people were euphoric about joining NATO, they were not being realistic about the costs. In the Czech Republic, worse yet, Havel’s prime minister was committed to balancing the budget. Biden pointed out that, if the Czechs joined NATO without raising their defense expenditures by a significant percentage, the United States was going to end up footing the bill. His fellow senators back in Washington were going to object. The Senate was not going to permit NATO’s expansion under those conditions. His voice rose. He invoked a terrible figure back home in the Senate named Christopher Dodd, who was already threatening to turn America’s attention away from Europe in the direction of Latin America.
“Mexico is fifty times as important to us as you are!” Biden said. Havel’s cabinet minister spoke up. He explained that the Czech Republic understood that each country had to pay its way. The minister wanted to know the goals. He wanted to be assured that everything had been realistically conceived. Biden exploded. “Let’s get this straight,” he said. “No one is asking you to join.” Biden had no intention of conducting a negotiation. “You would like to join,” he told the Czech leaders. They were also free not to join. And America was free to accept the advice of Senator Dodd and the champions of isolationism and to turn away from Europe altogether. He pointed out that, from an American standpoint, Asia, too, was extremely important, and not just Mexico. “Democracy is a bitch,” concluded Senator Biden.
Havel mumbled something about having already spoken to Jesse Helms, which suggested that he himself, the president, had a clear idea of the Senate and its thinking. But mostly Havel looked sallow and depressed. I followed Biden and his party back through the monastic galleries and stairways and out to the little plaza in front of the Castle, and as we made our way down the stone stairways, I sympathized keenly with poor Havel, the recipient of what had seemed to me an unforgiveable harangue from Biden. Mexico fifty times as important as the Czech Republic—what kind of arrogant remark was that to make to the Czech president? To the hero of 1989? I understood why the world hates America. It was not even that Biden held Mexico in especially high regard. Many years later, over dinner in New York, a retired senior government minister of Mexico told me that, when he was in office, he had met with Biden and a group of other senators, and Biden had launched into an equally insulting harangue about how Mexico ought to clean up its drug problem. Mexico’s official returned from the meeting in a fury.
THEN AGAIN, after a few hours of seething, the Mexican official reflected that Mexico’s foreign policy ought not to depend on his own feelings of personal injury, and Mexico did have national interests, and he ought to pursue them, regardless of Senator Biden. In a similar fashion I returned from the meeting at the Castle to my hotel at Wenceslas Square, and I resumed my own responsibilities, which at that moment required an investigation into the grandeurs of Czech beer. And, as my research deepened, I reflected on my own encounter with Biden, and I found myself concluding that, from a hardheaded point of view, Biden had done a good thing at the Castle.
He had laid out reality to the Czech leaders. The leaders were guaranteed not to like it. Given that most Czechs were afraid of NATO anyway, raising the defense budget in order to join was going to be doubly unpopular; and the unpopularity was bound to encourage the Czech leaders to engage in the kind of wishful thinking that prompts people to ask for clarifications, discussion of tiny points, debates over unlikely contingencies, and so on. The leaders were going to pore over Biden’s every last word to see if, beneath the bluster, he was holding out a possibility that faraway America would eventually offer a more palatable deal, and NATO could be had on the cheap. Senator Biden had made it impossible to entertain any such hope. He did not care whether the leaders of foreign countries looked with affection upon Joseph R. Biden. He preferred his messages to be unmistakable. A few well-chosen insults about the insignificance of the Czech Republic were guaranteed to deter anyone from getting all dreamy and unrealistic about American generosity. I came away respecting Biden. He was right about Mexico and its drug problem, too. Still, poor Havel.
Thanks to Paul Berman for allowing us to post this excerpt from his 2014 piece Democracy and the Human Heart: In Memory of Vaclav Havel.