Biden’s Mental Fitness and Age Aren’t the Problem, It’s His Out-of-Date Mindset
This is no time for national conflicts and nuclear arms races; It’s time for a global effort to combat climate change
Speaking as a journalist who will be hitting his 75th birthday in a few weeks, I want to offer my thoughts on the 81-year old Joe Biden, who appears to be hell-bent on trying to win re-election to a second term that, were he to be successful, would see him serving his final year as an president at the age of 85.
Before I go further in discussing that prospect, which I think is disturbing, let me digress for a moment:
Right now, I count myself lucky. A runner all my life since being a miler/2-miler and cross-country runner in high school, and having run one Boston Marathon at age 18, I am basically quite healthy and continue, despite a damaged right knee that I’ve lived with for 50 years, to jog three or four times a week, usually a distance of three or four miles, and do weight training on my alternate days. Professionally I just completed two of the biggest journalistic projects of my career, both over the course of almost four years. One is a remarkable and important feature-length documentary film, “A Compassionate Spy” on which I was co-producer, directed by two-time Oscar-nominee Steve James. It had its world premiere at the Venice Festival, and its US premiere in Telluride a day apart in September, 2022 and after a theater run that began in August of last year is now available on streaming channels here and abroad. The other project is a deep-dive investigative book into the same story titled Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the teenage atomic spy who may have saved the world (Prometheus Books, November 2023).
Sure I can forget names and occasionally have to wait for them to pop into my mind later unexpectedly (sometimes too late to make use of them), but I had no problem actually writing my 311-page, heavily footnoted book. Once the research and interviews were all done, I handed in my manuscript after four months, which only required a light edit. And I consider both those projects to be the most significant things I have done in the half century I have been working as a journalist.
I say that not to boast but to make the point that old folks like myself can still have brains that work — at least as well as they always have. I continue to write articles on important issues regularly, now for this new Substack site for the online alternative news site ThisCantBeHappening!, a site I founded in 2010 and converted to a collectively run project of four (now five) writers 12 years ago.
My father, who in what he later described as a moment of “ill-considered egocentricity” named me after himself, had two long, challenging careers. The first was as a MIT and U of Penn-trained electrical engineer, early computer pioneer and professor at the University of Connecticut, a position from which he took advantage of a brief early retirement offer and left at 57. The second was as a Jungian analyst, which he became after several years spent studying for a certificate at the Jung Institute in Zurich, where he had his coursework and practicum in German and had to write his thesis in that language, which had learned as an adult also. His therapist career ended when he saw his last patient at the age of 86. During his late 70s and early 80s, he wrote Jung and Pauli: A meeting of two great minds (Quest Books, 2004). Based on his research into two decades of correspondence between Jung and Jung’s most famous patient, the Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli, he considered it the greatest thing he had accomplished. Dad died in 2012 at 89 after hitting his head in a nighttime fall. Shortly before that he had complained to me with some dismay that he could no longer read magazine articles because, “I forget what I just read when I turn the page.”
Dad was an inspiring model for old age. Despite a devastating inherited auto-immune condition called ataxia which began slowly destroying his cerebellum in his early 60s, causing him to gradually lose his balance and the reliable use of his legs, he took up jogging, exercise of his upper body, and continued to have his intellect — even if his thoughts and words sometimes came more slowly, right up to the last few months of his life at 89. Indeed, a few months before his fall, he and I were sitting together on the back porch of the home he and my mother lived in, It was late in the evening and as we sipped two small glasses of merlot, I mentioned that some scientists working at the CERN cyclotron had managed to measure neutrinos traveling faster than the speed light from Geneva to a sensor in southern Italy. The experiment was being reported as upending Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which states among other things that nothing can move faster than 186,000 miles per second. Dad stunned me by almost immediately responding, “No, it doesn’t disprove Einstein’s theory, because neutrinos have no mass. That means there is no upper limit on the speed they can be accelerated to.” Given that in the article reporting on the phenomenon and the apparent flaw in Einstein’s fundamental theory, no one suggested a neutrino’s exceeding the speed of light was not necessarily a contradiction of Einstein, it was quite a remarkable display of an 89-year old man’s brain at work — especially one who hadn’t been working at science or engineering by that point for 33 years.
I mention these personal stories because they show that older people are often capable of doing major things, and that the mind doesn’t necessarily go, even if it may operate a bit more slowly at times and even if the body is failing. But I recount them also to show how quickly that can change, whether from an accident or illness, or something unpredictable like cancer or a stroke. We do not live forever and we cannot protect ourselves entirely or to the end of our lives from age-related declines in physical and/or or mental ability, even though we can reduce the some of the risks.
This brings me back to Joe Biden. At 81, he is entering a decade in life when anyone who reads the obits can see that bad things can happen suddenly and without warning. I know little to nothing about Biden’s genetic heritage, in terms of the longevity of his parents and grandparents, or of their mental abilities in old age, nor do we have access to his detailed medical record. That is, other than the worrying example during his first run for the White House when, during live CNN town meeting broadcast, he suffered a subconjuctival hemorrhage in one eye, which can be harmless but can also indicate high blood pressure or too much blood thinner, or the incident in 1988, over three decades ago, when he required surgery for two brain aneurysms, one ruptured, both apparently minor.
What his age means is not that he is currently suffering from dementia, but that voters who may re-elect him to an office hoping he will stay mentally and physically capable of handling until Jan. 20 1985, are making a risky bet. According to the Social Security Administration’s actuarial tables a American male of 81 today in normal health has a life expectancy of seven more years, which would only on average get Biden two years past the end of his second shift in the White House — a slim margin of error. This makes who he selects as his running mate critically important. When an ailing, frail and wheelchair-bound FDR won an unprecedented fourth term in November 1944, it was with a running mate, Harry Truman, who was no liberal New Dealer. Truman had been forced on Roosevelt at the party’s nominating convention that summer by a cabal of conservative southern state delegates, who replaced Roosevelt’s preferred running mate and current vice president, Henry Wallace, with Harry Truman, a little known senator from Missouri. Had Wallace, a left-wing New Dealer, remained FDR’s running mate, upon taking Roosevelt’s place as president upon his death instead of Truman he would surely have pushed to implement Roosevelt’s announced program for making the post-war US more of a social democratic society. Instead, a racist conservative, staunch anti-Soviet Democrat ended up taking over and the gradual dismantling of the New Deal programs of that Roosevelt’s three-term coalition, as well as a “Cold War” against Communism began.
But enough history! The problem for me is not just that Biden is too old to run for president because of the odds against his remaining in good physical and mental condition through his second term. It’s that his politics and his whole political world view is too sclerotic and anachronistic.
Biden views the world through the lens of the Cold War, for example, when he warns that if Russia succeeds in winning or even partially winning its war with Ukraine, gaining uncontested control for example of Crimea and the eastern portion of that former soviet of the USSR, Russian President Vladimir Putin will feel free to move militarily on other European countries on Russia’s borders (a ludicrous fear, especially considering the difficulty Russia’s military has had just dealing with a country as strife-torn and bankrupt as Ukraine). Biden also views China as an expansionist empire, itching to invade and conquer Taiwan militarily, and to threaten countries in the Southern Pacific, though it’s not clear China would want that kind of a fight unless it felt Taiwan was a threat, which it is not. Biden is wedded to the oil industry, promoting more drilling in ecologically vulnerable areas at a time that more and more warning sirens about accelerating global heating are blaring. He could not bring himself, at the start of his first term, to make a full-throated call for an end to student debt when such a thing could have been accomplished. Worst of all has been his fawning unconditional support for Israel’s all-out collective-punishment assault on the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza, mostly with the unfettered use of US-supplied planes, howitzers, bombs and cannon shells as well as a torrent of US taxpayer money plus full diplomatic cover in the United Nations Security Council. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, like the mobsters of Philadelphia, the city where he grew up and whom he has come to so resemble, has all but given Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken the middle finger when they’ve “begged” him to agree to a stand-down ceasefire and to “exercise care” for civilian Palestinians in Gaza in any further pursuit of remaining Hamas fighters in Gaza. Despite Netanyahu’s insults and disrespect, and total refusal to consider a Palestinian state, Biden’s strongest condemnation of this upstart yet deeply US-dependent “ally” has been to say that the Israeli “Defense” Force assault on Gaza has been “over the top.”
Nuclear weapons, which the world has anxiously lived with now for 79 years, all of that time since the August 9, 1945 incineration of Nagasaki, fortunately free of any actual wartime use of another nuclear bomb, are clearly incredibly dangerous anachronisms that should be banned. And yet Biden, who has at his fingertips the launch codes for the world’s most daunting nuclear arsenal, instead of confidently leading the effort to pare down the number of bombs and delivery systems or outright eliminate them is doing the opposite. His 81-year-old atavistic thinking, shackled as it is to the Cold War mindset he grew up with (as is the case, by the way, with all of the Congressional leadership (Democratic and Republican), Biden has continued to back what has grown to a $750-billion ten-year “modernization” of the US nuclear force, in order to make it more “useable,” with smaller “tactical” bombs. That figure also includes funds to develop new first-strike stealth nuclear delivery systems — planes lik the F-35 and pinpoint accurate ICBM missiles. (That figure, released earlier this month by the Congressional Budget Office, will be vastly exceeded because of predictable Pentagon cost overruns, and does not include the cost of a huge Naval fleet expansion, much of it to handle nuclear weapons and delivery systems.)
There are so many ways that one can see that this president is living in the 20th Century, not the 21st, where the existential threat facing both the US and the world is not international conflict. — no country in the world, including Russia and China, and certainly not Iran or North Korea, poses a serious threat of any kind to the US — but rather global heating, which is accelerating and will within decades be precipitating global ecological collapse and human death on a scale that is incomprehensible.
We need a candidate for President who can articulate that threat and to demand and help lead concerted global action to confront and, as much as possible, to mitigate or delay it. We’re past the point where palliatives will work, and past the point that global heating can be stopped, much less reversed. The damage is already done, and the processes, many of them feedback loops, that have already been set in motion are leading to more and more rapid climate catastrophe.
Tired old men (and women) with tired old ideas — and obviously that includes thev77-year-old Donald Trump and his Congressional minions as well as Joe Biden and his — need to go.
It’s too late to significantly change the makeup of the current Congress (median age in the Senate is 65,, and in the House 58), absent some catastrophe like the sudden halt of the Gulf Stream or an early summer hurricane bringing never-before-experienced sustained winds in the newly proposed Category 6 range of 157-197 mph striking and wiping out Miami. But given the growing focus on Biden’s memory issues and evident frailty (check out the thinness of his legs!) and the poor polling for current VP Kamala Harris, there is time for Biden to be pressed to bow out and allow someone younger and with a more inspiring and appropriately themed campaign of tamping down global conflict, wasteful provocative military spending and mindless focus on economic “growth,” and of seriously tackling the looming global climate catastrophe to take his place as a candidate to face Trump this November.
We’ve already been through this situation before. It was when, as we only later learned, President Ronald Reagan, in his second term, began to have serious Alzheimer’s dementia, a reality which was carefully kept covered up by his staff. It was five years after he left office that Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but his son Ron has written that he saw signs of the disease as early as the third year of Reagan’s first term. Others on his staff as well as reporters, have also admitted having observed signs of his dementia during the latter part of his second term. It can be expected that Biden’s White House and campaign staff, whose jobs depend on his staying the course, will also work hard to cover up his decline should it progress.
My own mother died of Alzheimer’s at 89, a year after my father died. My brother, sister and wife all saw signs of it coming years before she started forgetting who we were or where she lived. Some were things we noticed as things got worse and some earlier signs we only recognized looking back, after the evidence of her dementia became clear.
We should not, in the case of a president seeking another four years, have to be in the position of looking back at his behavior and his lapses and gaffes a year from now (if he’s out of office after having blown the election against Trump) or sometime during his second term should he manage to win one.
Besides, more importantly Joe Biden, memory and cognitive problems or not, is clearly not the president we need for the year 2024. With last year now declared the hottest year for this planet since 1850, following seven earlier years which each held that record in turn, we need a 21st Century leader.