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 This morning, the New Yorker’s ADAM ENTOUS published an in-depth look at President JOE BIDEN ’s family over the past century: the highs-and-lows of their businesses, the false family tales that have lived on, and the sad legacy of alcohol abuse. It was originally meant to be part of a book about the president and his family, Entous told West Wing Playbook. He had significant access to the president’s immediate family including his son HUNTER and his three siblings, FRANK, JIMMY, and VAL . But Entous ran into the worst sort of luck. He signed a book deal with Crown in late 2019 envisioning a tome that would require deep dives into various archives containing files on the Biden clan. A few months later, most of those archives — which are in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and elsewhere — closed for extended periods of time amid Covid lockdowns and with each successive variant wave. “They were literally all closed,” he lamented. Once the archives began re-opening, there was such a backlog of researchers that Entous could only get one appointment every two weeks. “This is a terrible outcome, but I’m trying to make the best of the situation,” he said. Even if the book is no longer happening, Entous still has spent more time reporting on Biden’s extended family history, and more time interviewing HUNTER BIDEN, than perhaps anyone else in recent years. As Hunter himself recounted in his memoir about his interactions with Entous for a July 2019 New Yorker piece : “We soon began to talk by phone almost every night for the next several weeks.” Hunter went on to concede he didn’t tell Entous that he “was actively smoking crack at the time.” Nor did he notify his “dad or his campaign about the New Yorker story,” which caused them some heartburn when they discovered it. Entous ultimately ended up seeing Hunter as a tragic figure in a long family line of alcoholics. “It's just this very tortured story of a dad who really, totally loves his kid, right?” Entous told us. “And the kid who totally loves and respects his dad. The kid gets addicted and he feels all this pressure to basically make money in order to support his family. And it just goes off the rails when his brother dies.” He added “business stuff, in my opinion, gets too much attention. The real story is the agony of this family, dealing with this problem [of alcoholism] generation after generation, and the high price it has for them.” Indeed, Entous’s piece Monday thoroughly documents the family chronology, all the way back to 1912 when divorce records describe Biden’s great grandfather “drunkenly abusing Joseph Harry’s mother and sister before walking out on them.” He also notes how drinking led Biden’s great uncle, “Big Bill” Sheene, to be committed, repeatedly, to Springfield State Hospital. He ultimately died there in 1967, according to local records. (Biden in his memoir, wrote that he believed Sheene had died in the mid-to-late 1940’s). The president is well aware of this lineage and it is part of the reason he does not drink. In 2008, he explained to The New York Times as he sipped cranberry juice that “there are enough alcoholics in my family.” Subsequently, he tried to convince his siblings and his children not to drink. As the eldest brother, he once told his younger siblings he’d give them $100 to avoid drinking before they turned 21, Entous reported. He was unsuccessful and some members of the family recognize they’ve suffered for it. “I have lived and died my recovery,” Frank Biden told Entous. “I mean, I have suffered the vagaries of fucking hell and come out the other side.” BEAU drank as an adult but later quit. As Hunter wrote in his book about his relationship with his brother: “Friends viewed us as different but not as separate. Two sides of the same coin. The biggest difference between us: I drank and Beau didn’t.” MESSAGE US — Are you JEANNE MOORE DEROSS, senior White House ethics counsel? We want to hear from you! And we’ll keep you anonymous if you’d like. Or if you think we missed something in today’s edition, let us know and we may include it tomorrow. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com.
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