Jon Meacham’s Absurd Biden Valediction

I f they are honest (and they probably won’t be), historians will have a field day trying to figure out why Joe Biden’s presidency failed. They might be loath to attribute some blame to one of their own number. They should not be. In a Monday valedictory essay so hyperbolic that it cannot be parodied (trust me, I tried), Biden court historian Jon Meacham showed once more why the brand of partisan power-worship that he attempts to pass off as honest historical assessment is so uniquely loathsome.

It was not a surprise when, during last week’s chaotic, extended media pressure campaign to get Biden not to run for reelection, one report alleged that he would announce the end of his candidacy with Meacham’s help. Meacham has been a consistent — and consistently deranged — muse for Biden during this last act of his political life.

Meacham was already using his authority as a historian to project an epochal aura onto Biden before Biden even became president. He endorsed Biden in March 2020 and spoke at that year’s Democratic National Convention. He helped Biden write several speeches, including the former vice president’s victory speech that November, which he subsequently praised without acknowledging his role in its writing.

This continued when Biden became president. In 2021, Meacham organized a group of historians who helped convince Biden that, rather than settle for a role as a moderate caretaker president, he should try to become an FDR-like figure. In 2022, Meacham inspired Biden to cast opponents of a proposed overweening intrusion of the federal government into voting laws as being on the side of George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis. And in August, Biden met with Meacham and other historians again. They helped him articulate the paradoxical notion that democracy would be under threat if Democrats lost.

Meacham denied reports that a Biden concession speech, drafted by him, was imminent. He may instead have been working on the laughable Biden encomium he published on Monday in his own name. Politico reported last month, when Biden was set to speak at Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, that Meacham was encouraging Biden, who “has rightly made the defense of democracy and of decency a centerpiece of his presidency,” to take full advantage of the “opportunity” the occasion presented.

Meacham himself has done so, using D-Day as a rhetorical bookend for his tribute. “Mr. Roosevelt framed the war whose dead Mr. Biden commemorated at Normandy in June as a battle between democracy and dictatorship,” he writes. “It is not too much to say that we, too, have what Mr. Roosevelt called a ‘rendezvous with destiny’ at home and abroad.” Using morally clear causes for domestic partisan ends does have precedent. But it is not good precedent: FDR himself argued in 1944 that to oppose his political agenda in the U.S. would be to “have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.” This is not an aspect of FDR one should admire or emulate.

FDR is not the only figure to whom Meacham compares Biden. To hear Meacham tell it, Biden’s declining to run for another term makes him like our nation’s first president: “His decision is one of the most remarkable acts of leadership in our history, an act of self-sacrifice that places him in the company of George Washington, who also stepped away from the presidency.” He is “a good man, a patriot and a president who has met challenges all too similar to those Abraham Lincoln faced.” And like FDR and Reagan, he “is optimistic, resilient and kind, a steward of American greatness, a lover of the great game of politics and, at heart, a hopeless romantic about the country that has given him so much.”

Clinging desperately to the edge of this Mount Rushmore like Cary Grant at the end of North by Northwest, Meacham will not see the flaws Biden has displayed throughout his political career. Yes, there has been tragedy, for which Biden deserves some sympathy. But there has also been vanity, bluster, fabulism, stubbornness, and greed. He lied about his law-school record, plagiarized a speech from a politician in another country (as well as a law-review article), flamed out in two previous runs for president, repeatedly argued with voters (and others) in inflammatory, ad hominem terms, and was at the very least unwilling to stop members of his family from profiting extensively and gratuitously off the family name.

Biden has spent the last few months of what will be his final year as president clinging bitterly to an office the whole world knew he was no longer fit to hold. What Meacham describes as his “surrendering the possibility of enduring in the seat of ultimate power,” which “has taught us a landmark lesson in patriotism, humility and wisdom,” was, in reality, an admission of defeat in a war of attrition with fellow Democrats who made arguments not in high-minded but in nakedly partisan terms, as his electoral fortunes waned. There was no nobility to this.

The full picture of Biden might suggest some more accurate historical precedents. There’s Jimmy Carter, the still-living one-term Democratic president whose chaotic tenure in the Oval Office convinced commentators at the time that the office was no longer possible for one man to hold. (Biden was one of Carter’s earliest endorsers in the 1976 Democratic presidential primary.) There’s Woodrow Wilson, who sought to remake the country in the image of progressivism and spent his final months in office hiding the extent of his debilitation from public view with the help of his wife. Go further back and there’s James Buchanan, an aged one-term Pennsylvanian who came into office with much political experience and left the country on the brink of crisis. Or Benjamin Harrison, who defeated an incumbent New Yorker to win his first presidential term and then lost reelection to the same figure. An honest historian could surely find many good analogues if he wanted to.

But an honest historian is not what Meacham aims to be. He has committed himself not to history as forthright assessment of the past but to History as the story of his favored policies’ inevitable triumph. Hence his eagerness to serve as its muse and to imagine not the past but the future, abusing the historical mode to project onto the present his preferences. “Here is the story I believe history will tell of Joe Biden,” Meacham writes, with hubristic presumption that practically begs for nemesis:

With American democracy in an hour of maximum danger in Donald Trump’s presidency, Mr. Biden stepped in the breach. He staved off an authoritarian threat at home, rallied the world against autocrats abroad, laid the foundations for decades of prosperity, managed the end of a once-in-a-century pandemic, successfully legislated on vital issues of climate and infrastructure and has conducted a presidency worthy of the greatest of his predecessors. History and fate brought him to the pinnacle in a late season in his life, and in the end, he respected fate — and he respected the American people.

We shall see.

One can at least grant that Meacham has been consistent. “To record history doesn’t mean you are removed from it,” he told the New York Times in 2020. He might have been better served had he believed otherwise, and had he not let proximity to power corrupt his historical sense. In the end, it’s possible he has secured a place for himself in history anyway. It just may not end up being a place he likes.