My First Thought When I Heard Joe Biden’s News

Joe Biden called me out of the blue last month. Something was on his mind. It was a few weeks before he went in for tests on the small nodule found on his prostate and received the tough diagnosis that was released publicly on Sunday. “Mr. President, what’s up?” I asked, as I stepped outside a D.C. restaurant to hear better, leaving my family at the dinner table.

What was up? He wanted to talk about “the future of the NATO alliance.”

He told me he was planning to give a speech to remind people how incredibly valuable the Atlantic alliance has been over decades to preserve world peace and prosperity and how crazy it was to think that the Trump administration and its congressional allies would risk breaking it up. He wanted to bat around some ideas. He would call a few days later, he said, but we never had the follow-up, because, I suspect, cancer got in the way.