President Joe Biden often talks about the close relationship he had with his father and how it affected him growing up as “the dirty kid from Scranton,” Pennsylvania.
Biden was born into wealth, the son of a polo-playing sailor. But his father, Joe Biden Sr., lost his job after World War II and abused alcohol. He struggled financially for years before getting back on his feet and finding middle-class work selling cars near Wilmington, Delaware.
Biden’s relationship with his father stands in contrast to perhaps every president of the past four decades, who had absent or distant fathers, violent or alcoholic fathers or stepfathers.
“The measure of a man is not how many times he gets knocked down,” Joe Biden Sr. told his son, “but how quickly he gets up.”
His father’s support boosted young Joe’s political career and provided comfort when Joe Jr.’s wife and daughter died. died in a car accident.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden recalled his late father’s belief that “there is no higher calling for a woman or a man than to be a good mother or a good father.”
My own father passed away in August 2020 at the age of 95. He also believed in the calling of fatherhood. My father and mother were there for us. They encouraged us to follow our own dreams and not theirs.
These kinds of supportive father-child relationships are common – except perhaps in politics.
Former congressional aide and political journalist Barron YoungSmith once wrote an article for Slate headlined, “Why Do So Many Politicians Have Dad Issues?” “American politics,” he wrote, “are overflowing with stories about absent fathers, alcoholic fathers, neglectful fathers.”
Ford, Reagan, Clinton
Gerald Ford’s father, Leslie Lynch King Sr., was an abusive alcoholic. Ford’s mother left King 16 days after the future president was born, when her husband threatened her and her son with a butcher knife. Ford’s mother married Gerald Rudolf Ford. When he was 22, Ford changed his name from Leslie Lynch King Jr. in Gerald Rudolph Ford.
Jimmy Carter’s father, James Earl Carter Sr., was a high school dropout who encouraged his son to read, a hard worker who urged his son to work hard, and a devoted husband and father. He served in the Georgia Legislature, but died of pancreatic cancer during his first term at age 58.
Unlike other presidents, Jimmy Carter did not have to search for his father, who never left. Carter’s upbringing was in stark contrast to both Ford, the man who preceded him in the White House, and Reagan, the one who followed him.
YoungSmith wrote that Ronald Reagan was still haunted by the moment he “found his alcoholic father on the porch…his hair filled with snow.” Reagan said his father was “drunk, dead to the world.” Reagan, who was eleven at the time, had to drag his father into the house. He spent the rest of his life trying to connect with a man who wasn’t there for him.
Psychologist Robert E. Gilbert said that Reagan can only be properly understood as the child of an alcoholic. “Alcoholic parents leave deep marks in the lives of their children; even after those children grow up,” Gilbert said, adding that Reagan was aloof and aloof and lived in a world of make-believe in which he craved approval.
Bill Clinton’s biological father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., died in a car accident before his son was born. Clinton was raised by a stepfather who was an abusive alcoholic and regularly beat his wife, Clinton’s mother. The abuse stopped after Clinton rebelled against his stepfather.
The bushes
George HW Bush experienced the burden of having a great man for a father. His father, Prescott, was a Wall Street investment banker who became a U.S. senator and an influential leader in the Republican Party.
George HW moved to Texas to escape his father’s shadow. He then relied on his father’s influential friends to make a fortune in oil before entering politics, where he served as a congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, vice president of the United States and then president.
GHW Bush’s eldest son, George W., responded to the pressure of having a great man for a father by drinking too much before quitting drinking and using his father’s influence to help him become governor of Texas and then become president of the US. YoungSmith said that George W. “throughout his life, including his presidency, oscillated between efforts to meet HW’s impossible expectations and efforts to ostentatiously reject them.”
Obama and Trump
George W. Bush’s failures as president contributed to the election of Barack Obama, the first black president. Obama’s parents separated when he was two, when his father left Hawaii and returned to his home country of Kenya. The father-son relationship became the basis for his autobiography “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” in which he wrote about the difficulty of not having a father around to help him navigate the problems of being a black man. a white-dominated country.
“It’s hardly worth mentioning that President Obama built his political persona around a search for his absent father,” YoungSmith said.
Obama was succeeded as president by Donald Trump, who once said he was “so confused because I had a father who put a lot of pressure on me.”
Fred Trump Sr., a real estate magnate, bullied and intimidated one son – Fred Jr., who died of alcoholism when he was 42. Fred rejected another son, Donald, and sent him to military school when he was 12. When Donald returned Fred taught his son how to be a “killer” in business, that the end justified the means and that empathy was a sign of weakness.
“Freddy just wasn’t a murderer,” Donald said of his brother.
Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist who was the daughter of Fred Trump Jr., said this lack of empathy prevented her uncle, Donald Trump, from acknowledging human suffering, including widespread death linked to the coronavirus pandemic.
“To acknowledge the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate them with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise,” Mary Trump wrote.
Biden, by contrast, spoke openly during the 2020 campaign about his love for his father and his own grief over the death of his son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015. In doing so, he made a very human and recognizable connection between his own father, himself and his own approach to fatherhood.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit organization providing facts and trusted analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Chris Lamb, Indiana University
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Chris Lamb does not work for, consult with, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond his academic appointment.
