The title of Joe Biden’s 2008 autobiographical memoir is derived from one of the most famous American poems ever. You know the one, by Robert Frost. No, not the one about which road to take, the other one. The one about stopping in the woods in the snow and considering larking off into the woods, but remembering that you have made promises to lots of people and don’t have an unlimited time to get fulfill them. The book’s title is suggestive that Biden had many things left to do in 2007 that remained unfulfilled and, moreover, he was determined to stick around long enough to get them done.
This is essentially a catalogue of the promises made and kept by Biden to that point with a glance into a future in which the promises which had so far not been kept would be fulfilled at last. Biden implicitly informed American even before he had spent eight years as Vice President that he wasn’t going to be done with public life if those promises still remained merely promises. Promises to Keep is, in a very substantial way, Biden’s promise to himself and his supporters that, if necessary, he would one day once again pursue the Presidency.
This can be a difficult message to detect for the casual reader. After all, the structure of the memoir is conventional: it is the tale of a life lived. All the highlights of Biden’s life that are by now well-known are detailed within the covers: his childhood stuttering problem, the aneurysm which necessitated potentially life-saving surgery, losing his first wife and baby daughter in a car accident, and, of course, his career-defining showdown which resulted in Robert Bork’s nomination to become Supreme Court justice being denied.
Biden defined his 2020 campaign for President against Donald Trump in person terms. He was offering himself as a return to decency and an opportunity to save the soul of America from being consumed by the rampant and bottomless corruption that had been not just exhibited but flaunted on a daily basis for the previous three-plus years. The election promised to be and did become a juxtaposition not between warring ideologies, but between two men representing two completely different approaches to the fundamental construction of humanity.
That division between Biden and Trump is mirrored in the two books bearing their name as author. Trump’s clearly 100% ghostwritten The Art of the Deal is an exercise in cynicism, image-making, style over substance and the completely ability to completely forget anything that happened more than two minutes earlier. By contrast, Biden’s book is one that deep dives into the past to examine both the successes and failures and both the good times and painful times to extract from them lessons which can be applied to the future. It is not going too far to say the ultimate division between the two candidates for President in 2020 are expressed in the overarching themes which singularly unifies these two tomes: those who can so easily forget the immediate past have absolutely no interest whatsoever of keeping any promises made about the future.
