The mood at the Presidential Inauguration of Joe Biden, in January, 2021, carried fewer notes of triumph than of uncertainty. Biden, who had roundly defeated Donald Trump, took the oath of office just two weeks after insurrectionists tried to thwart his ascension, and with his prospects for any significant legislation clouded even further by intense national division. And yet that climate—of imperfect arrival, of glory interrupted—was strangely suited to Biden, whose personal and political odyssey had given him a certain fatalism about life’s vicissitudes. Quoting a fellow Irish Catholic pol, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Biden once wrote, “To fail to understand that life is going to knock you down is to fail to understand the Irishness of life.”
For much of Biden’s half century in politics, he has been accompanied by Ron Klain, a Democratic strategist who first entered Biden’s orbit in 1986, when Klain, still at Harvard Law School, found work on the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by the voluble senator from Delaware. Decades later, Biden chose Klain to be his White House chief of staff, a pivotal, and gruelling, position overseeing the full spectrum of domestic and foreign-policy challenges. Perhaps because the two men had worked together so closely for so long, Klain—a Jew born in Indiana—embraced the Irishness of life as a guiding spirit for the incoming Administration: don’t let the highs feel too high, and don’t let the lows feel too low.
Biden prided himself on that homespun recipe for stability, having repeatedly defied predictions that he was finished. There were murmurings as far back as 1972, just after he was first elected to the Senate, when his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident and he assumed, for a time, that he would never find the strength to take his seat in government; and again in 1987, after charges of plagiarism drove him from the Presidential race; and in 2020, after he finished fifth in the New Hampshire primary.
Every campaign thinks that the pundits misunderstand them, but Biden and his advisers faced an especially broad skepticism. Even after Biden became the nominee, commentators mocked his constant talk of “unity,” his assertions that he could secure enough Republican votes in Congress to pass major legislation when Americans could not even agree on the utility of wearing masks, that a man of his age could win over the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But Klain, a campaign adviser at the time, believed that Biden’s experience in Congress could unlock more ambitious legislation than his critics assumed. When I interviewed Klain that summer, he invoked the example of Lyndon Johnson: “L.B.J. might not have been the wokest, coolest, hippest Democrat, but he’s the person who got the most actual progressive social-justice legislation done since F.D.R.”
When I visited Klain in his office, in the West Wing, in late January, he had announced, a few hours earlier, that he was stepping down as chief of staff on February 8, 2023, the day after Biden was scheduled to give his second State of the Union address. Klain, at sixty-one, whirs with a low-key intensity. More than one of his peers in the White House told me that he had a helpfully “paranoid” political radar, a catastrophic imagination for second- and third-order consequences that might seem as remote as a global pandemic once did. Klain and I spoke not only about the lessons of the first two years, but also about what might lie ahead for Biden, Democrats, and American democracy; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. At the start of our conversation, Klain motioned toward an unlit fireplace. “That’s where Mark Meadows burned documents,” he said, referring to the testimony of a former White House aide during the January 6th committee hearings. “I have not lit it once.”
This is a space in which a lot has transpired. Is it a kind of place that means something to you, or are you not a geography person?
I am a geography person. I’m a history person. And, look, over the years, I have come to this office many times with other people at the head of the table. But obviously it was very different to come in here with me at the head of the table—and with the Zoom board.
That was a feature of this time. But you’d served under how many chiefs before?
Nine chiefs of staff.
And you’d been offered the job, I think, in the past?
I was, by President Obama, in 2013. But it didn’t seem like the right time. So I passed.
Wasn’t the right time?
For family reasons.
So we’re going to work our way up to the present. But I want to start way back at the beginning, which is to say, you grew up in Indianapolis?
I did.
Your father was a contractor?
My father ran our family’s plumbing-supply business. It’s like a lot of businesses in this country—it was a classic middleman business. And eventually it went under because, basically, contractors started to buy things from places like Lowe’s and Home Depot and didn’t need a plumbing-supply house.
What drew you to politics?
It goes back to the plumbing-supply house. In 1968, I was six years old. We had a historic primary in Indiana. Bobby Kennedy was running for President and they needed a place to do an event. They did these events where, basically, they were kind of like town halls, but on topics, and they wanted to do one on small business. “Senator Kennedy speaks to small business.” And my father’s small supply house had stayed in the downtown part of Indianapolis; it never really had the chance to move out to the suburbs. And some Kennedy advance person picked my dad’s business to do this event. Completely fortuitous.
And so, on a cold morning in the early spring of 1968, Bobby Kennedy was at my dad’s plumbing-supply house filming a town-hall kind of thing. And I got to meet him. And it was exciting, and inspiring, and impressive. And then, a month later, Martin Luther King was killed. Senator Kennedy famously came to Indianapolis and spoke in Indianapolis that night. It was a famous speech—the pain of Aeschylus, all these things—and, all over the country, inner cities burned. But not Indianapolis. And my father’s business was right where the businesses would’ve burned if the city had burned. And even at age six the idea that there was a thing where what people said could change whether or not a city burned or not—it was so powerful and immediate, and I was, like, “That’s what I want to do.”
At that point, was your family particularly political?
Not at all. Not at all. Neither of my parents finished college and neither was really that interested in politics.
Is that the sound of a—
That’s the sound of the President’s helicopter coming to take him to Camp David.
The reason I ask about the political environment is, Joe Biden talks in some ways about how his origins owed a little bit to the political atmosphere in the house, how his Dad thought about politics, how other members of his family did. But it didn’t sound like that was something you were leaching from?
Not my house, no.
So you came upon it in the way you described, and then what came next?
A lot of student-council elections, I guess, that kind of thing. And then Georgetown, and here I worked on Capitol Hill all four years. I took a leave of absence to work on Birch Bayh’s last campaign, 1980, and went to work while I was at Georgetown for Ed Markey. Continued working for him after I graduated college, before I went to law school.
If you hadn’t gone into politics, what would you be doing?
I don’t know. I mean, I like to think I would be a race-car driver, because we did that in Indianapolis. Very popular thing. Not sure I really have the chops for that. Probably just be a lawyer, I guess.
And so you eventually started working for Joe Biden, in ’86. When you got to the judiciary. And did you get to know him much at that point?
I did. That was in the run-up to his 1988 Presidential campaign. And the way I got connected, like I said, was I’d worked for Ed Markey in the House, and then on his brief 1984 Senate campaign. A couple of the consultants involved in the 1984 Markey Senate campaign wound up getting involved in the early stages of the 1988 Biden Presidential campaign, particularly John Marttila, who had taken me under his wing, and he brought me into Bidenland. I worked at the Judiciary Committee, but my job was to also do a lot of the policy work that ultimately got used by the early rounds of the Biden Presidential campaign. And so that was my involvement in the run-up to ’88.
And then you guys stayed in touch, in one form or another, over the years. And then when did you next work for him again?
I left in ’87 before the campaign really started; I was a clerk to the Supreme Court for two years. When I finished, I came back as chief counsel of the Judiciary Committee from 1989 to 1992.
Part of the reason why I’m asking these questions about accumulating sediment and experience is because we have a cult in American politics revolving around the idea of the outsider who comes into Washington and has a homespun, natural way of solving these problems. But I’ve been a little suspicious of that.
Look, I’ll be honest, I’ve been more than suspicious of that. I’ve been in and out of the White House many times, worked for President Clinton, Vice-President Gore, obviously Vice-President Biden, President Obama. And, through the years, you always wind up in these conversations where you get a call from a friend of a friend of a friend that says, “Hey, will you see Charlie? He wants to come into government.” And Charlie will be forty-five, fifty years old, and he will be a very highly compensated person, either in law or finance or something. And he will say, “I’d like to come work in the executive branch. I’d like a very important position running some big thing.” And I will always say, “If I called up your business right now and said that I would like to show up in your business as a senior executive having never worked in the industry, having never worked in the field, having no experience, would you hire me?” And they always say, “Well, no.” And I kind of wonder why the opposite should be true.
Look, obviously, my life experience is twenty years in government, twenty in the private sector. So I get the fact that there are outside experiences that you can bring to us. They’re very important, and we have people who have different backgrounds. But I think one reason why our team has been successful working for President Biden is that we are all people who have spent a substantial part of our careers in government or in politics, and experience matters. I think that, at the senior level, we’re one of the oldest teams ever here at the White House, but that age has purchased a lot of experience.
Mike Donilon and I first worked together on a Presidential campaign in 1992. When I was working for Biden in ’86 and then left to go do my clerkship, the person I tried to hire to replace me in 1987 was Bruce Reed. And the only reason he didn’t join is because Al Gore then decided to run for President himself, and Bruce went to work for Gore. And Anita [Dunn] and I first worked on the Birch Bayh campaign in 1980 together. And, though I’ve worked less with Jen [O’Malley Dillon], she’s certainly very, very, very experienced. And Susan Rice and I first worked together in the Clinton Administration. It’s a very experienced group, and I think that matters.
Have there been any challenges over the course of the last couple years where you’ve thought, I wouldn’t have known how to do this earlier in my career?
Well, I’d say that everything has some element of that in it. Obviously, my work on the COVID response was highly impacted by my work on the Ebola response, kind of understanding how those agencies work. My work on the legislative agenda here is influenced by my work on the legislative agenda in prior Administrations and my time on Capitol Hill. I had sat across the table from Mitch McConnell in 2010 when then Vice-President Biden negotiated the deal we cut with them at the end of that session.
Just kind of go down the line: I first worked with Senator Chuck Schumer when he was Congressman Schumer and the chair of [a] subcommittee on the [House] Judiciary Committee, when Joe Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. So part of that is relationships that have been built over time, and experience with that.
Over all, I’d say the biggest thing that an experienced team brings is a sense of persistence and not panicking. So we live in a world where the news cycle’s very fast, and we have been declared dead, dead, dead many times during the campaign, since we’ve been here. Those of us who’ve been around know that if you stick with it you can get things done. And that the first read isn’t always the right read, and that you just have to keep after it and keep after it and keep after it. And I think that is the biggest thing that our experience brings.
And then, as I said, it’s domain expertise about the government itself and the agencies of the government. It’s relationships. Relationships matter. Not just myself but Steve Ricchetti, and Mike, and Bruce, and obviously Louisa Terrell know a lot of people on the Hill. That helps say, “Hey, we can do this. We can’t do this. We can go this far. We can’t go that far,” and be trusted when we say that.
I was paying a lot of attention to the role that Joe Manchin was playing in showdowns over legislation, particularly the Build Back Better bill, and, if you take that as an example, how do you decide when you can push? There were people saying to you, “You’re wasting time—you guys are going too slowly.” And then, of course, there were others who were saying, “You’re asking for something that’s too big and impossible.” How did you navigate that?
Before we get to Manchin specifically, what I’ll say is that I feel all the time like a lot of what we do is being on a sports team. And a lot of this is sports radio, where everyone’s, like, “Oh, you should have called that play. You should have called that play. Fire the damn coach!” Every week, it’s “Fire the coach,” right? Again, I think part of experience and maturity is tuning out all that noise and believing in the strategy, and the plan we had, and the team we had, and the people we had, and continuing to execute.
Look, this is the first White House I’ve ever been in where we have the exact same Cabinet we started with, except there’ve been a handful of departures on the senior staff. They’ve been kind of personally oriented, like Jen Psaki taking care of her kids and whatnot. No one’s been pushed out. That’s allowed people to know that we’re just in this, and we’re going to keep getting better and we’re going to keep improving, and so on and so forth. And there was a big push that we should fire Jake [Sullivan] after Afghanistan, a big push that I should get fired after the Build Back Better thing blew up, and you know . . . you can go down the list. I think the fact that we all had the President’s back and the President had our back was what enabled us to continue at this.
The Manchin thing . . . look, Joe Manchin is in the hardest situation of any person in our caucus in the Senate. He is a Democratic senator from a state that Joe Biden lost by thirty-nine per cent. You have to start there. You have to measure how far he can go and still be viable in his home state. At the end of 2021, obviously, we had a blowup with him where we thought we had a deal, and he kind of thought we had violated the deal, and it was super complicated. It obviously wound up in a very bad place, and I bear some responsibility for that.
Why do you say that?
Well, because I got frustrated with where we were, and we felt a need to take some shots at him. He was taking some shots at us. Nothing was too mean or too personal, but it certainly didn’t help. And we decided that we would just . . . he and I had our kiss-and-make-up moment. Gina Raimondo cooked us dinner. It was delicious. But, more importantly, him and I had some reconciliation.
As a team, we went to work on trying to find the middle ground that he could get to, that made sense for him. Part of that was we had to let him come back to us. I think our core philosophy was that we were never going to put something on the table and make him say yes. He had to put something on the table. So credit to him for being willing to come back to the table, willing to find something. But it was a long and slow process.
And, eventually, the center of gravity moved a little bit more to him and to Schumer.
Correct.
What role did the White House want to have? What role did it have?
What we wanted was success. It was clear to us that the best way to get success was to have Senator Manchin and Senator Schumer work together. We worked behind the scenes to try to narrow gaps, to kind of provide solutions, technical assistance, advice. But credit goes to Senator Manchin and Senator Schumer for striking a deal. And, look, sometimes the best thing you can do as a White House is to know when you should not stick your nose in. And that, in and of itself, is part of understanding how to do this. That was a big part of our strategy in the spring.
When you look across the major economic bills that Biden has championed, what is most important to you personally—the heaviest lift, or the one you were least expecting to succeed, or the thing that you think left the most durable impact on people’s lives?
There are a bunch of answers to that question. First of all, I think the American Rescue Plan was absolutely vital. It was vital because we went big, we went bold. There was a lot of skepticism of it. And we won. I know there are people who say, “Oh, it contributed to inflation.” I don’t think that’s true. What I know is that we are sitting here today with inflation on the way down and unemployment at 3.5 per cent. That is an economic recovery that is kind of unprecedented in this country. And, by the way, we also reduced the poverty rate enormously. We have more people with health insurance than at any time in American history. We paid for a lot of COVID treatments, including Paxlovid—and that is why, when you look at COVID right now, cases go up and down, but deaths stay like this [traces a horizontal line in the air]. That really was the rock for a lot of what we did that followed.
Individually, a lot of other things were very significant. The legislative thing’s obviously huge, quite an agenda. Student-debt relief, also a really important thing. Marijuana reform, also important. It’s a package of things. For me, personally, I would say judicial nominations and confirmations, which have been something I’ve worked on my whole career, to put the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, to have unprecedented diversity and quality in our nominees at an incredible pace. Really, it’s been something I’ve been very proud of.
How do you understand the fact that there is not more of a reflection of that either in poll numbers or in the commentary around the President?
Well, I think those are different questions. I understand the poll numbers. I think we’re at a time where the public is just very hard on leaders. Joe Biden’s approval rating is forty-three, or whatever it is. It’s the highest approval rating of any leader in the G7, other than the new Prime Minister of Italy. A lot higher than Macron, a lot higher than Scholz.
So I just think that this is a giant conversation, that we’re just at a place where, in democracies, we’re going to find that forty-three or forty-four will turn out to be a very high approval rating, just because people are polarized: the people on the other side are never going to say you’re doing a good job, and for the people in the middle it’s just easier to say, “Eh.” The measure of political success is the midterms. People can poll and poll all they want, but, in the end, people went to the polls. We obviously won a bunch of governorships, we won state legislatures, we got just a little bit of a setback in the House—but a historically small setback in the House. If you want to measure our political success, I think it’s less about the President’s polling number than the electoral result we delivered in the midterms.
In terms of the commentariat, look, I think there’s certain things that they love in a President: soaring rhetoric and pithy bons mots and all these things, the kind of things that make Jed Bartlet a great President on “The West Wing.” But what Joe Biden brings to this job is wisdom, relationships, character, and determination. And those are kind of nineteen-sixties values that don’t get the credit they deserve in the year 2023. I think that’s unfortunate.
With the midterms strategy, a lot of people outside of this building said, “You’ve got it all wrong.” The author Chris Whipple, who has reported on the first two years of the Biden Administration, recently described a moment where, essentially, the President said, “I want to go everywhere. I want to talk about everything we’ve done.” But you made the case to him that, actually, no, we should talk about reproductive rights and democracy and go to a few places. Did he need to be persuaded, or did he kind of go with you on that?
So, look, I want to start with the premise that the chief strategist in this building is Mike Donilon. And the strategy we followed in 2022 was Mike’s strategy. I get a lot of blame for things I don’t do. I get a lot of credit for things I don’t deserve credit for. That is the nature of this job. My fundamental job in 2022 was to make sure that we were implementing the strategy that our chief strategist thought was the right strategy. That’s kind of what you do as chief of staff.
I did go to the President and say a couple things: One, on the accomplishments, the best thing we can do on those is let the senators and congressmen run on them themselves. Let them talk about the bridge that’s coming to their district, the chip factory that’s coming to their district, the new solar plant, whatever. Let that be their thing. And I will tell you, on Election Night, as the President called winners, one by one, the senators and congressmen—I’ve never seen anything like this—volunteered up, “I won, Mr. President, because I bragged about this bridge. I bragged about this road, I bragged about this thing.” They used the accomplishments. That was their platform.
What he could really do uniquely, as President, was have a national message about the Supreme Court and Dobbs, implicitly about Trump and his extremism, and about democracy more broadly, MAGA Republicans more broadly. And we did that through a series of high-profile speeches. The thing we did in Philadelphia, the thing we did at Union Station just before the election. And the President bought in. I mean, the President understood that, bought in, and we executed. I think it made a big difference.
A question about Afghanistan. How did you, as the person in charge of staff, experience that? What would you have done differently in retrospect?
The darkest day of our, certainly my, two years here was the day we lost thirteen service members at Abbey Gate. No question about it. No question about it. But what I will also say is that I remember Clarissa Ward on TV standing on the runway saying that there’s no way these people are going to get fifty thousand people out of here. We got a hundred and [twenty] thousand people out of there, and thirteen people gave their lives to get a hundred and [twenty] thousand people out of there.
So the evacuation was a tremendous achievement at a great cost by heroic men and women working on the ground, backed by a President who met with the senior commanders here and via Zoom in the region, and who met every day with one question: “What do you need that you don’t have?” And he continued to provide that.
Look, we ended the longest war in American history, and I understand why the way that ended has been criticized. I think the alternative to what we did would’ve been a lot of Americans dying in Afghanistan in a continuation of the longest war ever in this country’s history.
A question about the President and age. He has said, “Watch me.” Judge me on the basis of how you think I’m doing the job. You’ve watched him up close intensively. People must ask you all the time, “Can he really do this job?” I would pose it to you slightly differently: Should he do it? You’ve seen him, you know the stakes, you know the strain. What do you say to people who say it’s too much for somebody his age to be taking on.
I say a couple things. First, judge his record. Look at what he’s put together. With that age comes a lot of experience and a lot of wisdom. There were a lot of world leaders in February of 2022 saying that Vladimir Putin was not going to invade Ukraine. And [Biden] said that he is going to invade Ukraine and we need to get ready, and we need to assemble a coalition. That is an insight that is more important than whether or not he sometimes bungles a word, or whether or not he sometimes squints when he reads a cue card.
The ability to understand the big things that are going on in international affairs and in domestic affairs, to make the right judgments, to then assemble the coalition to take this war on, to balance the need to provision the Ukrainians and the need to not escalate this war to expand into other countries in Europe and to a more exacerbated conflict with Russia—that insight, that wisdom, and that experience are invaluable. And so I just think his performance as President is the ultimate test of his ability to be President. People can judge that for themselves.
The second thing I’d say on the political front is this: There’s every reason to believe that Donald Trump will be the nominee of the Republican Party in 2024. I understand that a bunch of polls now show Trump leading, and so on and so forth. Donald Trump in 2016 beat every comer in the Republican Party, including Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and Scott Walker and Ted Cruz—he beat them all, and then beat Hillary Clinton. There’s only one person who’s ever beaten Donald Trump, and his name is Joe Biden. And the people who have doubts about his candidacy better have a damn good answer for who is going to beat Donald Trump other than Joe Biden. And that answer needs to be based on something other than past performance, because past performance produces only one answer to that question. That’s how I see it.
You’ve decided to leave your position at the White House. Why now?
Well, I think a couple things. I kind of always thought that if I could get halfway, run one of the two laps of this term, that would be a pretty impressive thing, and allow the President to get through his first term with just two chiefs of staff. And so there was kind of that general thought.
These past couple months, also, my mother’s been ill, and I’ve been working here six days a week and flying home to Indiana every Sunday morning and staying there till late Sunday night. And so that also kind of weighs on me. But, look, I think this was always, from my perspective, the design. Could I get to two years? Could I make it that far? And could I put the President in a position where I would do it for two years, someone else would do it for two years, and he’d leave his first term with just two chiefs of staff?
You’re leaving at a moment when the President is contending with a crisis around classified documents. How does it feel to be leaving with that unfinished?
I have a great deal of confidence that, when all the facts are known, people will understand the President did nothing wrong here and comported himself well. If I made the rule that I was not going to leave until there wasn’t a crisis at the White House, I would be here as long as Joe Biden is President, because there’s always a crisis at the White House. And that’s what this is. He and I started this conversation around the midterms, that I was going to leave. He asked me to stay through the lame-duck session, and I did. But this is the right time. ♦
