A Conversation with President Joe Biden

President Joe Biden has an affinity for those who wear the cloth of their country, especially those in the National Guard.

Biden is a Guard father, but former Delaware Guardsmen say Biden was a staunch supporter of their force many years before his son, the late Joseph Robinette “Beau” Biden III, joined as an Army Guard judge advocate general officer in 2003.

It was through Beau’s service that the 46th president of the United States and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden learned the personal challenges and rewards of Guard service. They still consider themselves a Guard family, and the first lady hosts other Guard families in the White House every holiday season.

The president spoke about his relationship with the Guard in an interview with NATIONAL GUARD on Dec.13 in the Oval Office of the White House. It was the first time in 20 years that the magazine has interviewed a sitting president.

You and the first lady, Dr. Jill Biden, often refer to the Bidens as a National Guard family. Your late son, Beau, spent more than a decade in the Guard. When did you first become acquainted with the Guard?

I became acquainted with the Guard when I was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and we had a lot going on then. This is when I was a U.S. senator [1973-2009] and before I became vice president. I also was very engaged with the Guard because I had a responsibility to deal with national emergencies. So, whether it was a hurricane or whether it was a crisis that occurred, the Guard was always a matter of fact. I visited the Guard [on hurricane duty] recently in North Carolina.

Then, one day [in 2003], Beau said, “Dad, what are you doing on Friday? I said, “Why? What do you have in mind?” He said, “Can you pin my bars on?” I said, “Pin your bars on?” He said, “Yes, I joined the National Guard, dad.”

Beau had volunteered as assistant U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia to go to Kosovo and to try to help settle the situation there. When he was in Kosovo, Beau got engaged with what was going on in the region, and I remember him going up to Camp Bondsteel [the headquarters of the Kosovo Force’s Regional Command-East, headed by the U.S. Army].

The first highway ever built in Kosovo after the war was named the Joseph R. “Beau” Biden III National Road. He told me, “Dad, I met a lot of folks over there. I want to be part of it. And he used a phrase which gave me chills. I said, “Why?” He said, “It’s my duty, dad. My duty.” And so, that’s how Beau got engaged [in the Guard]. And how I became more deeply acquainted with the Guard than I’d ever had been before.

When Beau came to you in 2003 and asked you to put on his bars, what did you tell him about the Guard?

I told him that there was a very good chance he’d be deployed at some point. A lot of Guard members were being deployed for a long time. And he had not been married that long, had two kids. I thought he was taking a chance.

In 2008, his unit [the 261st Theater Tactical Signal Brigade] received orders to deploy to Iraq. He was attorney general of the state of Delaware at the time, so he did not have to go. He also had a serious disease, spondylitis [a type of arthritis], which he caught when he was over in Kosovo, and he had to get a waiver to deploy. I kept wondering why the hell he kept coming down here to Washington. He was going over to the Pentagon to try to get a waiver. Anyway, one thing led to another. I won’t get into all the details, but he got the waiver and temporarily gave up the attorney general’s job.

I’m not just being a dad. The best headline I ever saw in the state of Delaware was, “Biden, most popular man in Delaware — Beau.” He should be sitting behind this desk, not me.

In 2010, you told the adjutants generals gathering in Washington that, “This ain’t your father’s National Guard.” How has the National Guard evolved in nearly 50 years of your elected service, and what has remained constant about the Guard?

It’s not going to give you the answer you’re going to expect, but I think the main concern about the Guard is, in a time of war, they make greater sacrifices than almost anybody else does. The reason they do is that they don’t have an infrastructure for their families. Their families are largely on their own.

The active component lives on a base. They have support. That doesn’t occur as much with the Guard. The biggest change in the Guard is it has become much more sophisticated in terms of what it does, the use of weaponry it has, the kind of weaponry it has. It’s a little bit like what’s happened across the board with all the military.

I think that as the large scale deployments like Vietnam came to an end, the need and use of the Guard was more available and appropriate. In other words, we didn’t have to deploy a whole unit, especially as it related to national security issues as well as environmental issues. Here at home, if you got a problem, call the Guard and the Guard got called out for civil rights movements. I mean, it just became sort of a national police.

In 2008, at the NGAUS Conference in Baltimore, you became the first candidate for vice president or president to advocate for the chief of the National Guard Bureau to become a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I did more than advocate. I pushed really hard. Really, really hard. I had the authority from the president to do that. As I said, if you’re Regular Army, and you’re deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever you’re deployed, you have a whole backup system that relates to not only you, but your families, as well. Everything from Walter Reed [National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland] to what’s on the base to your family’s education.

I mean, for example, my wife started an operation. She called it Joining Forces. In the late 2000s, a lot of Guardsmen were deployed overseas, a whole hell of a lot of them, and if you had a dad or a mom deployed in your Regular Army, they’d have a picture of them outside the classroom, going into the classroom, or they’d talk about how your daddy is over there fighting. The Guard wasn’t treated that way at all. So, Jill started a thing in Delaware where we went to every school. We went to every school and said, “Any kid who had a father or mother deployed, you should have a picture of that father or mother outside the door of that classroom.” So, she started this.

I’m not criticizing the Regular Army, but the Guard is sort of sitting out there. And, you know, this is ancillary. Most of them have a full-time job, and, by the way, their National Guard obligations. Whereas with the rest of the military, you’re in the military. You’re there and you have help available, including medical help.

I didn’t know at the time, and what made me feel badly about it was when Beau got deployed, even though I knew the Guard was in a different place in terms of what’s available to it, I didn’t taste it, didn’t feel it, but I watched it happen with my grandkids, with my daughter in law, with family.

I don’t think most people knew how many people deployed from the Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I didn’t think that the Joint Chiefs paid a lot of attention to the Guard, and they had special expertise too. So, I was mildly persuasive, making sure that it happened.

How valuable has it been to be able to consult with the chief of the National Guard Bureau while you were president?

Very valuable. Admittedly, I consulted with the chief of the National Guard Bureau more on domestic policy than I have on international policy. But as president or vice president, I had direct access to pick up the phone and call the Defense Department. It was not like it was hard to get to anybody.

Mr. President, earlier this year, the Department of the Air Force, submitted a legislative proposal to move approximately 1,000 Air National Guard space professionals to the Space Force without the legally required consent of the affected governors. All 55 of the nation’s governors, that’s all 50 states and five territories, have said this is a breach of the governors’ authority over the Guard when not federally mobilized. Additionally, most experienced Guard space professionals say they don’t want to leave the Guard. Why is the Air Force so adamant to take the Guard out of space?

They have more expertise. A lot of National Guard members have technological backgrounds working with companies that can know more than the guys in the Air Force know. They know what they’re doing. So, you go to the place where you find these experts.

The only reason I didn’t veto it is because they don’t have to go if they don’t want to. If you’re one of the 1,000 [space professionals] in the Guard, just say. “I’m not going to go.” You don’t have to go. They’ll find another person. Somebody who was willing to do it. So, as long as it became, in that sense, voluntary, it was OK by me.

Sen. Jon Tester from Montana, the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, has said you were a driving force behind the 2022 PACT Act. Why was that legislation so important to you?

I’ve been here 50 years, either as a senator, a vice president or president, and one of the things that I’ve learned is that we have some truly sacred obligations as a country. We need to prepare those we send into harm’s way. And we need to care for them and their families if they come home and if they don’t come home. We haven’t always cared for them. How many thousands of soldiers were exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam? How many thousands have suffered as a consequence of that? All because they couldn’t prove it was Agent Orange.

And when I went to see Beau overseas, I’ve been in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq 38 times as a vice president or as a president, and his hooch was close to one of the largest burn pits in Baghdad, burning everything from some human carcasses all the way to rubber ammunition. Terrible stuff.

Beau was one of the healthiest guys in his unit and came back to the states with glioblastoma. There have been more brain cancers as a consequence of this war than any time in American history.

But they couldn’t prove it, and I thought to myself, What the hell is going on here? I had a lot of help. I got incredible help from the New York firefighters from 9/11. They went to bat for us in a big way. All those guys got compensated for the brain tumors that they had as a consequence of going into the buildings [at Ground Zero], because we’ve now realized that the toxic smoke from these fires has a profound negative impact on the human brain.

It was a long fight, but we want to make sure that they were taken care of. For example, why in the hell should a kid who is the son or daughter of someone who gets shot in Iraq and killed have the benefit of educational benefits, and the kid whose father or mother comes back with brain cancer because what they’re exposed to not get covered? And so, I fought like hell and the firefighters were the biggest help I had.

And so, we pushed and pushed and now everyone who can prove they were exposed to certain toxins are covered. That’s the presumption. It’s changed everything.

We’ve had over 1 million people that have benefited from the PACT Act, so far. And that’s who we are as a country. It’s an obligation. We have a moral obligation to take care of these people.

I appointed a great head of the Department of Veterans Affairs [Secretary Denis Richard McDonough] and he’s really pushed it. So, it’s a big deal.

Why should it be the burden of a soldier, a sailor or an airman to prove the bad thing they’re exposed to? They were fine before it. Why should they have to be a scientist to prove that what they had was a consequence of what they’re exposed to? So, presumption was changed, and it made a difference in thousands of lives.

Have you had a chance to talk to some of them?

A lot of them, a whole hell of a lot. And everywhere I go, I hear: “Hey, Mr. President, thank you. Thank you.”

I think it matters. We have a lot of obligations, but one is truly sacred: Taking care of those who suit up and go into danger for the rest of us. One percent of the men and women in the country carry the burden for the other 99% of us.

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TOP PHOTO: NGAUS Communications Director John Goheen interviews President Joe Biden in the Oval Office of the White House. (Photo by Adam Schultz)

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AT A GLANCE: President Joe Biden

BORN: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., Nov. 20, 1942 (Scranton, Pa.)

FAMILY: Married Neilia Hunter in 1966. They had three children: Joseph Robinette “Beau” Biden III (1969), Robert Hunter Biden (1970) and Naomi Christina Biden (1971). Neilia and Naomi died in an auto accident in December 1972. Biden married Jill Tracy Jacobs in 1977. They have one child: Ashley Blazer Biden (1981). His eldest son, Beau, died of brain cancer in 2015.

EDUCATION: University of Delaware, Newark, Del, B.A.1965; Syracuse University School of Law, Syracuse, N.Y., Juris Doctor, 1968

PROFESSIONAL OVERVIEW: U.S. President, 2021-present; Vice President, 2009-2017, U.S. Senate, 1973-2009; public defender; private attorney; New Castle County (Del.) Councilman

SENATE COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS: Chair of the Judiciary Committee and Foreign Relations Committee

ALSO NOTABLE: While in the Senate, he commuted every day by Amtrak train for 90 minutes each way from his home in Wilmington, Del., suburbs to Washington, D.C., to save money and be with his family. A total of “1,220,000 miles,” he says.

Source: White House bio