Why Joe Biden, man of contradictions, is just the president to unite a divided United States

What separates Biden from his predecessors are the intricacies of his character and career, which make him uniquely qualified to handle these extraordinary times defined by calls for unity and justice, healing and retribution, a return to normalcy and radical change

Chi Wang

Published: 12:30am, 28 Jan 2021

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Ever since I arrived in the United States in 1949, I have closely watched presidential inaugurations. At first it was merely out of curiosity as an outsider; I always intended to return to China. I ultimately stayed in the US and spent nearly 50 years in Washington teaching at Georgetown University and working at the State Department and Library of Congress.

I watched both of Eisenhower’s inaugurations, as well as that of John F. Kennedy, who I once lived across the street from in Georgetown. Decades later, I had the privilege of watching the inauguration of one of my former students, Bill Clinton.

Joe Biden’s inauguration has certainly been different from any of those I have seen in my 70 years in the US, though it is not without historical parallels. While Donald Trump’s disdain for Biden and refusal to attend the inauguration are a stark break from recent presidential tradition, it is far from unprecedented.

The nation’s second president, John Adams, failed to win re-election and left town early in the morning to avoid attending his successor Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration.

Andrew Johnson, who assumed the presidency after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, was impeached by the House of Representatives and was only narrowly acquitted by the Senate. His party did not nominate him for a second term and he shunned his successor Ulysses S. Grant’s inauguration.

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The security threats looming over Biden’s inauguration in light of the Capitol riot are also not a first. Lincoln’s first inauguration occurred after seven states had already seceded from the Union and just weeks before the outbreak of the Civil War. He was sworn in despite numerous assassination and kidnapping threats.

More recently, Barack Obama was sworn in for his first term in 2009 despite serious concerns about a potential terrorist threat. The threat, while it proved unfounded, was deemed so serious that Obama’s team prepared remarks for him to deliver in the event he had to orchestrate an evacuation of the inauguration. Obama kept the remarks in his coat pocket throughout the ceremony.

What truly separates Biden’s inauguration – and his presidency – from the rest are the intricacies of his character and career. He is a study in contradictions. He is well-known for being both cantankerous and amiable. Throughout my career in the Library of Congress, I have found him to be more of the former than the latter.

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Many recent profiles of the president-elect have struggled to reconcile his stark ambition and capacity for empathy – a “frankly odd combination of personality traits”, wrote Marc Fisher for The Washington Post.

The ambition is well documented. Biden wrote an essay about wanting to be president when he was just seven years old and a plan for how to achieve the office while he was in college. He named one of his dogs Senator. Yet his capacity for empathy has also been described as a “superpower”.

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His personal tragedies, including the deaths of his wife and daughter, and later the loss of his son Beau to cancer, have left him with a particular sensitivity and genuine ability to sympathise with others who have suffered losses.

While Biden began his career as one of the youngest senators ever elected, he is now the oldest president to take the oath of office. He defeated the Republican incumbent in the Delaware Senate election in 1972 by citing his youth and emerged victorious over a wide Democratic primary field for the 2020 nomination by touting his experience.

Biden, with all his contradictions, may be uniquely qualified to handle these extraordinary times defined by calls for unity and justice, healing and retribution, a return to normalcy and radical change.

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In his inaugural address, he vowed to “press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and significant possibilities, much to repair, much to restore, much to heal, much to build, and much to gain”.

He insisted unity was essential to addressing the imposing challenges the US faced, while acknowledging that the very concept of unity was dismissed by some as a “foolish fantasy” in the current, bitterly divided political climate.

“Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we’re all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, demonisation have long torn us apart. The battle is perennial and victory is never assured.” Yet he insisted unity was still the only path forward, and the only path on which America had never been defeated.

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Biden’s presidency will further be set apart from his predecessors’ for its diversity. It begins at the top with Vice-President Kamala Harris, the nation’s first woman to hold the number-two office.

He has also filled his cabinet with historic nominees representing the Latino, Asian, black, and LGBTQ communities. Biden hopes these diverse picks will better represent the spectrum of American society and contribute to greater national respect for and identification with its government.

It remains to be seen whether Biden’s call for unity and his inclusive cabinet will translate into action; the House of Representatives sent an article of impeachment against Trump to the Senate on Monday.

In the following weeks and months, it will become clearer, as Biden pursues his agenda focused on combating the coronavirus pandemic and economic downturn at home and recommitting to multilateralism abroad.

Trump’s inaugural address four years ago – during which he vowed an end to “American carnage” – now seems darkly ironic when juxtaposed with the violence his supporters brought to the Capitol earlier this month. In four years’ time, I hope that Biden’s call for unity does not stand out as similarly ironic.

Chi Wang, a former head of the Chinese section of the US Library of Congress, is president of the US-China Policy Foundation