The former first lady’s cataractous view from the East Wing.
The former first lady’s new book is one for the books. For other books, that is. An unremarkable reference volume that more-serious authors will feel obliged to reference when writing more-serious books about President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s unremarkable tenure. View from the East Wing adds up to something less than the sum of its many terrifically banal anecdotes. It adds down. Contrary to memory, the memoirist insists that this halcyon presidency was bedeviled by unknowable unknowns, all of which turn out to be things that most people mostly knew.
The East Wing as we’ve known it since the 1950s no longer exists. (Essential workers such as the staff of the White House Graphics and Calligraphy Office have been relocated.) So here’s a title with some traditionalist appeal: Doctor Jill Tracy Jacobs Biden had a view that perhaps nobody else in our lifetime will, no? No. Her vision extends no farther than the China Room. A view of the East Wing rather than from it, for the most part. The holiday décor, the menus, the paintings. Champagne and French fries with Brigitte Macron. Butter-poached Maine lobster and wine pairings. Purple pantsuits, designers, dresses, designer dresses. Might the author have offered slightly less ordinary observations about extraordinary experiences? At the wedding of the crown prince of Jordan (a country where the labor force participation rate of women is about a third that of men), she and Queen Rania “bonded over advocacy for the education of all children.” Happy days. It’s an intellectual and literary xeriscape.
Naturally, life wasn’t all Macrons and macaron tastings. Even easy street requires legwork when you’re in high heels. How can a single human be expected to teach ENG 111: College Composition (online) at Northern Virginia Community College in the morning and attend a longish performance in honor of Bette Midler at the Kennedy Center in the evening? Think of the emotional labor. The Russian invasion of Ukraine gets a chapterlet, about four double-spaced pages: a requirement for this memoir-writing class. Hamas’s barbarism against world Jewry gets even fewer. Soon after October 2023, Dr. B decides that Israel has gone too far and leaves a Post-it note on the president’s bathroom mirror. “Net has to stop.” The book is a war of attrition against the senses. Surrender; negotiate an international treaty against enriching weapons-grade tedium.
Maybe the banality is the point: if the author’s recall is so painfully detailed, detailed, detailed, it will also be taken to be accurate. Federal Covid policy doesn’t warrant any retrospection, in case you’re wondering. Joe’s “strategy was working”; “Tony,” the chief medical adviser, “was easy to travel with.” The president was tested for Covid every day for three years, but “the American Urological Association doesn’t recommend routine prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for men older than seventy,” so what can you do? Military advisers didn’t think the Taliban would overrun Kabul quite so quickly after the departure of American forces from Afghanistan in 2021. Unknowable unknowns. “Joe seemed tired” and was “traveling too much,” but that debate performance in June 2024? Nobody could have seen that coming. In fact, Dr. B reckons, it might have been overpreparation that did it. We’ll never know. Of course “physically, he was no longer 100 percent”: a rather safe calculation. But really, the very next day, Joe gave one of his “all-time best speeches” as she stood by him in her “vote vote vote dress designed by Christian Siriano.” He wasn’t feeling too well on the day of the debate; did someone give him an Ambien? We’ll never know.
Dr. B doesn’t mind a bit of cognitive dissonance. For all the president’s work to prevent “domestic abusers” from buying guns, she doesn’t see why Hunter Biden should have been prosecuted for an offense of “so little consequence.” Yes, she admits: it was good and right that President Biden refused to shield Hunter and allowed the justice system to operate impartially. The old boy had left no aspect of domestic or public life unabused, after all. But it was also good and right, we’re told, if you care to know, that the president pardoned Hunter when he didn’t like the outcome of the justice system’s impartiality. (And in a world of so many unknowable unknowns, why not preemptively pardon five other Biden family members, too?) All’s well that ends. The price of politics is that “no one gives you any leeway or grace,” the first lady discovered. For all they got from politics, it’s a price the Bidens should keep paying.