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The most famous man in America, poised to save the world yet again, finds his powers guttering as the big fight approaches. As he lurches and mumbles, friends and colleagues beg him to quit before he trashes his legacy and drags them all down with him. But he’s convinced he can pull off one more heroic act and regain his place at the top. He’s beaten the odds before. This time, though, he’s wrong. He humiliates himself. He is too old. He’s over. He will spend much of the rest of his life with an advancing disability, watching black-and-white Western movies.
That’s Muhammad Ali’s cautionary tale, not Joe Biden’s. But I wonder if the president thought of it when he made the opposite choice and stepped out of the presidential campaign. As a longtime reporter on the Ali beat, his story jumped to my mind immediately. Forty-odd years ago, when the legendary boxer was 38—easily equivalent to 81 in political years—he lost badly to Larry Holmes, the heavyweight champion. He was criticized for hubris and delusion. Biden’s decision to quit is being hailed as “courageous,” and even “patriotic,” as he put the good of the nation above his own pride and ambition. It was also out of character—not an old man’s decision at all. While Muhammad Ali’s disastrous decision to fight on may have had far less national consequence, it was more in keeping with the upbringing and sensibility of a 20th-century American man forged in the crucible of power and triumph, primed to never surrender.
Like Biden and Ali (who would be 82 if alive today), I was raised in an era in which the hero was supposed to die trying, or at least pay lip service to the heroic ideals of protecting the weak, putting women and children first, and speaking truth to power (just so long as they didn’t conflict too obviously with the accepted hegemony of the old white man). It was the ethos of the aging gunslinger and it came with the righteous High Noon obligation and privilege of duty.
Until suddenly it didn’t. Donald Trump, liar, grifter, felon, accused rapist, ego-driven buffoon, flipped every morality play about good and evil. Grendel’s mother, Goliath, and the Frank Miller gang from High Noon won. Exactly what elements of popular grievance and billionaire scheming were the dominant factors in the right-wing coup have yet to be completely exposed, but we clearly entered a new and dangerous time.
Nevertheless, the bad guys, despite the Supreme Court and all, couldn’t quite solidify their power, and in 2020, Biden beat them back. By the old rules. But after his disastrous debate against Trump in June, Biden—wounded, abandoned by many allies—was staggering into the shootout. He seemed to have no chance. He also seemed to have no choice. He was a product of his times and he had to die trying. And maybe he did, by his lights, with a political suicide that could seem like a selfless sacrifice.
At 86, which would be Biden’s age had he won and survived a second term, I have mixed feelings about his stepping aside, even if he was bum-rushed by his billionaire backers.
I sympathized with Joe even though I wouldn’t want him as a crossing guard. Old age always comes at a bad time. My lower back makes too many of my decisions these days; tolerable for a laid-back semi-rural life, but dicey if Bibi and Putin are waiting for callbacks. I smile a lot to cover having missed the last joke or your name. And it’s only lately—after a term as, yes, a president—that I’ve come to realize that there’s very little extra a person in their 80s brings to the game.
I was president of a small town’s senior citizen foundation, a fundraising, do-gooder group whose board was made up of a dozen elderly people who variously worked hard, lazily, innovatively, obstructively, in alert or zombie-like modes—pretty much, I thought, as they had acted all their lives. Institutional memory was a good thing, but too often it appeared as numbing anecdotage. The nice ones could be passive, the mean ones relentless. Being old was not a shared identity beyond aching joints. In Biden’s world, I thought, these included the entitled seniors whose “wisdom” sent youngsters to war.
Was I being too cranky (read: old) wanting Biden begone? I checked with my closest old friend, the actor Harris Yulin, who is my age. He, too, had been appalled by Biden’s debate performance and was relieved when he quit, even understanding the trade-offs. Old actors have fears of not retaining their lines, but they know how to anticipate and prepare for the inevitable panics. Okay, we agreed, Biden had seen everything and wouldn’t be rattled by a fluctuation in the Fed. But we were worried he’d stumble on the campaign trail and be run over by Trump.
So what’s worth the risk, we wonder? It’s all about never counting an old guy out, we decided. When my dad retired in his early 70s, he declared himself useless, over-the-hill, and settled into a rocking chair life. His knees and ears were shot, he said. I can’t travel or hold a conversation. That lasted a year. He was tapped to help old people with taxes and their interactions with local government agencies. He had a surge of fresh life that lasted until he died suddenly three months shy of 101.
Let’s remember that Biden’s presidency was also a delayed renewal after he was passed over in 2016. It was successful enough that in giving it up he has been compared to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. This seems rather grand: Washington was presciently concerned about creating a monarchical president and Lincoln’s Civil War was further advanced than Biden’s. What I think was truly admirable was a more personal crisis, giving up what I have come to think of as “the warm,” that affirming focus of light that comes from fame, as small as it might be—in my case three stints as a TV talk show host—especially if the intoxication of it includes feeling a righteous destiny as Biden surely did (“I’m the guy,” he kept chanting in a recent ABC interview).
Biden’s departure from the race also broke up “The Old Couple,” that weird pairing of two geezers past their use-by date. Trump’s lifetime of deceit obscured the deterioration of his memory and articulation. At 77, obese and drifty, fueled by rage, he is surely even more unfit than Biden. Perhaps because I started covering him as a journalist in the 1980s and didn’t take him seriously for 30 years, I never fully recognized how much he had changed, or at least how the impact of his public appearances escalated. When did Trump’s buffoonery become charisma? How come we never considered his lies less the product of evil intent and more the mistakes of a deteriorating mind? Can we start giving him the Biden golden age scrutiny, with the understanding that Biden might be past his prime, but at least he had a prime worth honoring?
Biden’s legacy now depends on the presidential election. He’ll be a moral and political hero if Kamala Harris wins, which would be a final flourish as thrilling as Ali’s. Fifteen years after his humiliating loss to Holmes in 1981, Ali, trembling with Parkinson’s disease, lit the Olympic torch at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
Biden successfully campaigning for the first woman president, missteps and stutters included, would be as gallant and magnificent a coda to an inspiring career.
Robert Lipsyte, a longtime reporter and columnist for The New York Times, is most recently the author of his thirteenth YA novel, Rhino’s Run.