| The staff writer Evan Osnos explains what he hoped to learn during his exclusive Oval Office interview with President Biden. A decade ago, having recently moved from Beijing to Washington, I paid a call on Vice-President Joe Biden. He was deeply involved in foreign affairs—dealings with Iraq, Ukraine, Turkey, Brazil—and, though he was not a fresh subject for much of the political press, I found him startlingly frank. He said what he thought, not only about distant potentates but about the humid workings of élite politics and about his own dramatic life. (His communications people tended to wear the tight smiles that you see on lion tamers.) I took to interviewing him, first in his office in the West Wing, then out on the road. During the pandemic, in 2020, I spoke with him at his home in Delaware, when his own tortuous path to the Presidency, full of trials and suffering, seemed to pose almost the perfect opposite to Donald Trump’s life of immunity to self-examination. When I embarked on this latest Biden story, last fall, I was interested in two big questions: Could normal political training still work at an utterly abnormal political time? (Biden was gearing up for a rematch against a man on a vengeful crusade to escape prosecution; and House Republicans were trying to mount an impeachment case against the President, while also ousting their own Speaker.) The other question was the oldest and most bedevilling for a candidate: What makes a person think they must occupy the White House? So much about our political life is inhospitable, and Biden, already America’s oldest President, could have declared his mission complete at the end of one term. After so many years of studying Biden, I felt compelled to understand what stew of ingredients—strategic, psychological, historical—mixed in his mind to make him say, in effect, I am making the best choice for the country, for myself, and for my family by running again. The answer would be of vast consequence, and I wanted to hear it in real time, because after the fact, no matter the outcome of the election, the story will be warped by the exigencies of pride and perspective. Sitting down with him in the Oval Office, I was struck by how—more than with any other politician I’ve encountered—his political calculus is inextricable from his biography. To understand why Joe Biden is running in 2024, you have to go back to the man, and even the boy, he was decades ago. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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