Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Max President JOE BIDEN arrived in South Carolina on Wednesday afternoon for a family vacation on Kiawah Island. The small resort island southwest of Charleston with 10 miles of beach has long been a favorite Biden family vacation spot. But this visit marks the first since June 2015 when the family traveled there after the funeral for Biden’s son BEAU. The moment is fitting. In the morning, the president signed a bill that expands healthcare and family benefits to veterans exposed to toxic “burn pits” at military bases by an estimated $275 billion over the next decade. The legislation had become a top priority for the president, in part because Beau was stationed near such pits while serving in Iraq from 2008-09. Because the evidence is not clear cut, the president has almost always been careful to say in public that he doesn’t know if exposure to burn pits — sites where the military disposed of materials by burning them — ultimately caused his son’s death. ”We don’t know for sure if a burn pit was the cause of his brain cancer," he said in March at the State of the Union. But today, he said publicly what he often says privately: burn pit exposure killed his son. Addressing the young daughter of a veteran who died from cancer, Biden pointed to Beau’s teenage son, HUNTER, who was in the crowd Wednesday: “His daddy was lost to the same burn pits.” After he signed the bill, Biden gave the pen to the same young girl, BRIELLE ROBINSON, the daughter of HEATH, the veteran for whom the bill is named after. After shaking a few hands of people around the table where he signed the bill, the first person Biden walked to in the dense crowd was his grandson. The president embraced him in a tight hug, patting his back. Biden had brought Hunter to meet Brielle and her mother, DANIELLE, before the signing event started. According to Danielle, Hunter noticed Brielle was carrying a “daddy doll” that includes a picture of her dad — a common stuffed toy for the children of military families. She recalled him saying: ‘Hey, I have one of those, too.’” “Hunter and Brielle kind of had a moment together, and he has like the exact same one that Brielle has so that was really, really special,” Danielle told West Wing Playbook in an interview. In that Blue Room meeting, she said that Biden “started tearing up” and joked that he had his “tissues in my pocket ready” in case he became emotional. But besides appearing to brush away a tear at the beginning of his remarks, the president seemed emotional but poised during today’s event. Hours later, he boarded Air Force One with much of the Biden clan, including his own son HUNTER, and his wife, and their toddler, BEAU JR., who looked up and saluted some of the servicemen on the tarmac. The last time Biden visited Kiawah Island was searing. On a bike ride in 2015, he passed by a spot he had once visited with Beau. Biden wrote in his memoir, “Promise Me, Dad”: It was like I could hear him talking to me again. Dad, let’s stop and sit down. I got off my bike and found myself standing at what felt like the edge of the earth — just ocean and beach and woodlands. It was magnificent. I found myself suddenly overwhelmed. I could feel my throat constrict. My breath came shorter and shorter. I turned my back to the agents, looked out at the vastness of the ocean to one side and the darkness of the woods to the other, sat down on the sand, and sobbed. Danielle believes that today’s event may have eased that pain. “This one was definitely a personal accomplishment, I felt like, for him and his family,” she said. “I think both with him and with our family and so many other families that were in the room, I think it felt like it was a moment of we can all just kind of breathe."
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