HE WAS MY ROCK

America’s new president, Joe Biden, reveals the heartache of watching his son lose his battle with cancer

THE president’s office rang right on schedule. On that day in April 2015 I grabbed my notes and headed down the corridor to the Oval Office for my weekly lunch with Barack Obama. He and I talked briefly about Tikrit at our lunch, and about what might come next in Iraq, but I think he could tell I was distracted and down.

Barack knew I was just back from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, and he knew I was headed back there soon.

The president had kept up with the general outlines of what had been happening to my eldest son.

“How did it go, Joe?” he asked. “How is Beau?”

The talk at lunch ended up being almost entirely about Beau. I could tell looking at him across the table that the president was genuinely concerned. He liked Beau and respected him and thought, like me, that my son had a big future ahead of him.

I found myself explaining to him what Beau had just been through the previous week and what was coming up, attempting to keep it on a fairly straightforward, clinical footing. Part of that was for my own protection. I did not want to break down in front of anybody, least of all the president of the United States.

But as I talked to Barack across the table that day I must have started to confide things I hadn’t intended to. I was hurting, and the president could see it.

As I explained to him that the next procedure – the injection of a live virus to attack the cancerous cells in the brain tumour – was uncharted territory, but it was our only hope to save Beau, I looked up and found Barack in tears. He is not a demonstrative man, in public or in private, and I felt bad. I found myself trying to console him.