Promise Me, Dad

A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

By Joe Biden

President Obama had been working hard to find ways to improve relations between the police and all the communities they served, and had developed very specific policy proposals. But there were too many people invested in scoring political points instead of solving the problem, and attacks on the president by people like Lynch and Giuliani made it almost impossible for him to get a fair hearing.

I had been around long enough to know the good policy was always necessary but rarely sufficient. I had worked long and hard over the years to build a personal relationships and gain the trust of both sides so that I could reason with both the police and the community in the most inflamed of circumstance. I had always tried to understand everybody’s perspective.

(Biden 2017, 42)

Police in the city – and around the country – were angry and grieving. Some were also genuinely hurt that so many people seemed to have turned against them. They needed to be reminded that their service was worthy of our honor and respect. Being a cop is not just what these men and women do, I have always said, it is who they are. I could pick out the sort of classmate who would become a cop when I was still in grade school. They were the person who came to your defense when you got jumped in the neighborhood. When you were being bullied, they stepped in. They wanted to protect other people.

(Biden 2017, 43)

“What do you have for today?” the president said, as we sat.

Barack was just back from his Christmas vacation in Hawaii and he seemed to have an extra degree of calm in his already placid demeanor. The last midterm election of his political career was behind him, and though it hadn’t gone well for us Democrats, the president would never again have to stand and be judged by voters.

(Biden 2017, 69)

Nobody can say for sure how many were killed at Dachau in the years before that. I assigned Finnegan (his granddaughter) an essay that included the following poem by Martin Niemoller, a Protestant pastor who was thrown into a German concentration camp at the end of the war:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me –
and there was no one left to speak for me.”