More than a year after leaving the White House, the former First Lady of the United States, Jill Biden, wrote her memoirs in which she recounts various episodes of her life and family, as well as the cancer illness her husband, former President Joe Biden, suffers from.
Jill Biden, 74, confessed that her husband might have been suffering from cancer during his last year in office. “The year before we left the White House, Joe started waking up repeatedly at night.”
She added that she consulted doctors about his bathroom problems. “Last night he woke up seven times,” she says. “I’m worried about him,” she writes, adding that she trusted the doctors would treat him properly.
“Now that the doctors were aware of the problem, I trusted that Joe would be examined and treated. But, from what I could see, the problem persisted. Even knowing this, I never imagined that the cause of this very common symptom of aging would turn out to be cancer,” she writes.
In the book “View from the East Wing,” 288 pages long and set to be published this Tuesday in the United States, Jill Biden intertwines the story of the 2020 campaign and her husband’s brief presidential term with broader themes such as mental health, loss, family, and the relationships forged during that time. “In the end, it becomes clear that Jill Biden is Joe Biden’s most loyal supporter and most trusted advisor, although she acknowledges that their nearly half-century of marriage might have blinded her,” CNN wrote.
After her husband’s prostate cancer diagnosis once he left the White House, she writes that the time it took to detect his symptoms “made no sense.”
“The question was: how was it possible that the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, a man who has a medical team—not just one doctor, but a medical team—around him 24 hours a day, ended up with such advanced cancer?” she writes. “Joe couldn’t even stub his toe without 10 people running to him waving bundles of gauze. Do they wrap the president in bubble wrap and he ends up with stage four prostate cancer? It made no sense,” she points out.
Regarding his age, the former First Lady states that she believed Joe Biden—now 83 years old—was “definitely aging” in office, but “fully capable of the job.”
Jill Biden defended her husband’s decision to pardon their son Hunter Biden, 56, weeks before leaving the White House. The pardon covered the period from January 1, 2014, to December 1, 2024, at a time when he had been convicted on federal charges of illegal gun purchases and tax evasion. “We couldn’t allow our son to go to jail.”
In an interview with CBS, she said that the “Department of Justice changed and I think the process was not fair to Hunter.”
“When Trump was elected, things changed, and we knew he would go after Hunter. And we simply couldn’t allow our son to go to jail for a charge for which… no one had ever gone to prison,” she said.
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Jill Biden regrets not having spoken earlier with the family about Hunter Biden’s addiction until her daughters asked her for help to organize an intervention. “I was raised to be stoic and reserved. No matter how bad the situation looked, I believed Hunter would recover on his own. Now I regret not having tried to talk about it earlier. Many people knew how serious the situation was, but said nothing, and I didn’t ask,” she admitted.
Jill thought Joe Biden was having a stroke during the 2024 Atlanta debate with Donald Trump, which practically ended the Democrat’s campaign. During the 90 minutes of the debate, he froze, had difficulty finishing sentences, and frequently lost his train of thought.
President Donald Trump—whom she names as “Donald” only once and at other times refers to as “Joe’s opponent,” “the former president,” or “the incoming president”—has a great influence, and his effectiveness in undoing her husband’s policies during his second term is clearly a constant source of despair for the Biden family, CNN wrote.
Jill Biden describes herself as an introverted wife married to a very extroverted husband. Regarding issues and policies, she recounts how she encouraged her husband to “broaden his circle of advisors” and how she gave her opinion on conflicts such as the war between Israel and Hamas.
She also reflects on what it means to be the spouse of a president, a role that includes “(sitting) with people who are having the worst day of their lives.”
That included the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which she considers a “turning point for Joe’s administration.” When they met with the families of the 13 U.S. military members who died at Kabul airport in August 2021, she says it was “the first time we met with a group of military families and were not received as friends, but, by some, as enemies.”
The former First Lady speaks fondly of her relationships with other women who have served as First or Second Lady, including Hillary Clinton and Karen Pence, as well as with their counterparts abroad.
Her relationship with former Vice President Kamala Harris seems more complicated. It started off on the wrong foot after what Biden described as “hypocrisy” during a 2019 Democratic debate. And although she considers her the “clear” choice for the vice presidency, the former First Lady seems resentful of the quick pressure Harris exerted on her husband to gain his support when he was preparing to end his reelection campaign.
She adds that Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, was “an authentic person, a gift that sometimes in Washington can feel like a lifesaver in the ocean.”
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