What Jill Biden Doesn’t Say in Her White House Memoir

Photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story“To me, a house is not a home without a pet,” Jill Biden writes in “View from the East Wing,” her new memoir about her tenure as First Lady. “I think there are pet people and non-pet people; you either love animals or you don’t.” Arguable, perhaps, but those familiar with the Bidens’ ups and downs may have had a guess about where she was heading with that, narratively speaking. The Bidens brought three German shepherds to the White House: Champ, an elderly dog who died just months after moving in, and his young successors, Major and Commander, who were, to put it succinctly, biters. Secret Service records released as the result of a Freedom of Information request reveal at least twenty-four occasions on which Commander, alone, bit agents—a tally that doesn’t include attacks on other staff members. One agent ended up in the hospital. Eventually, Major was sent to live with a friend and Commander with relatives. They have also been banished from “View from the East Wing”; the only mention of any Biden dogs is an oblique reference to Joe “tripping over” an unnamed one at the beach house the family owns in Delaware, in pre-Presidential days. Instead, Jill’s raising of the pet-people flag is followed by an ode to Willow, a cat, who brought “joy to children” who visited the White House grounds.

The rhapsodies about Willow, paired with the silence surrounding the difficult dogs, contribute to a sense of make-believe and avoidance that pervade Biden’s memoir. As she surely knew, her book is appearing at a time when there are doubts about her openness with regard to Joe Biden’s fitness to serve as President. In an interview in the days before it was published, she made headlines by saying that, while watching her husband’s disastrous performance during his debate with Donald Trump in June, 2024, she’d wondered if he might be having a stroke. That revelation raised other questions: Why didn’t she intervene? Did she seek a medical follow-up? And why insist, afterward, that all was well? But in the book, it turns out, she dismissed her stroke fear once she had spoken to her husband and decided that he was fine. (They went on to other events that evening, at which, publicly, he seemed steadier.) She says that she had also wondered if he’d “been drugged” or had a bad reaction to cough medicine—and still isn’t sure. But her more enduring worry was: “Oh God—will people watching assume that this is how he is all the time?”

She insists that he was not: that behind the scenes, her husband’s capacities weren’t meaningfully diminished; that he was older, yes, but fine; that the debate was a one-off aberration, and that the notion of a health coverup is simply “absurd.” But a surprising aspect of the book is how little time she spends backing up that claim, which, in the wake of other reporting on the Administration, both before and after the election, is increasingly dubious. She more or less shrugs and declares the debate business a mystery; again and again she retreats to her main theme, which is that her life in the White House was “magical,” like being in a beautiful “snow globe.” Perhaps the unruly dogs would have complicated a memoir that is filled with scenes of amiable house staff bustling around, bearing cheeseburgers or glasses of Cabernet, always ready to “create the ambiance that you wanted.” The President, she writes, “was always within reach of a Coke Zero or an ice cream bar.”