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 Eli | Email Lauren It took months for his campaign to agree to the interview. But after JOE BIDEN struggled to respond to Democratic primary rivals during televised debates in the summer of 2019, his staff finally agreed to the sit-down with The Atlantic’s JOHN HENDRICKSON. The resulting article, an examination not just of Biden’s lifelong effort to overcome a stutter but of the author’s own experience with the same disorder, was a sensation. It illuminated a largely unexplored and somewhat taboo aspect of the then-candidate’s biography, one that helps explain much of the 46th president’s persona: his deep reservoir of empathy, the chip on his shoulder and his identifying with the underdog. But by laying bare his own first-hand experience, Hendrickson also brought the issue of stuttering, which affects some 3 million Americans, out of the shadows. It led to a deluge of email and letters from fellow stutterers and, ultimately, to the memoir he’ll release next Tuesday. West Wing Playbook got an advance copy of “Life on Delay,” Hendrickson’s personal excavation. We spoke with him Tuesday about the book and his own observations of Biden. This Q & A has been edited for length. Your story brings into the open something people feel shame over and totally alone with. It felt like its own sort of ‘Me Too’ moment where so many stutterers suddenly realized they aren’t alone. I had never written about my stutter and I was terrified to do so. The reaction that I got was completely overwhelming. Total strangers who stutter began sending me letters and emails and messages telling me their life stories. It was profound. It led me to reconsider parts of myself and my own identity. I reached out to my old kindergarten teacher, my 6th grade girlfriend and it was hilarious and weird to be like, ‘Remember me? Remember this one thing we never talked about? Can we talk about it?’ And their recollections and the vividness of their memories totally blew me away. Were you surprised that so many of them seemed to recall you, at least outwardly, being more or less okay? Maybe more than you actually were? It wasn’t until I began going to therapy around the age of 30 that I realized how much of this whole thing I had compartmentalized, how I had told myself that everything was just rolling off my back, nothing could upset me. The reality was I was just pushing everything deep down inside and going to therapy really unlocked a lot of that. I don’t know if this timing is coincidental or not but it was about a year and change before I began work on that Biden article. That was when you finally felt comfortable enough to write about this subject? I’m not sure I ever felt comfortable or I ever felt ready, but it was just this thing that happens in journalism where suddenly an assignment exists and the train’s leaving the station. How did the Biden campaign react? They knew I was a person who stuttered because I told them in an email but I don’t think they were prepared for me to ask him about life as a stutterer so candidly and openly. Biden has certainly talked about that part of his life but it was always presented as a childhood problem that he had overcome. And myself and other adult stutterers, as well as many therapists, researchers and experts, we could just see and hear the lingering manifestations of it. What do you hear when you hear him speak now? Biden has done a tremendous job of managing his stutter. But we’re just witnessing an older version of this man not managing his stutter as deftly as he may have in his 40s or 50s. That’s not an insult, that’s not a fault; it’s just a natural thing. So when he’s speaking and then he stops abruptly and says, “well, anyway” or something and doesn’t finish the thought, you think that’s him managing his stutter? It’s a valid question, but it’s a case-by-case basis. There certainly are moments where he appears to be avoiding active stuttering. It’s not some Get Out of Jail Free card, it’s not some perpetual cover of every mistake, every gaffe. There are many instances when he mixes up a name or a place and it has nothing to do with his stutter. But in other moments you can see the manifestations of it — blinks, movements of his mouth. And part of why I wrote this book is: none of that has to be a problem or have a negative stigma. It doesn’t have to be categorized as a weakness. It doesn’t make him unpresidential. It’s a neurological disorder and it’s something that happens and it’s important to acknowledge it. In the book, a Biden aide tells you how stuttering gives a person a deep capacity for empathy — but also anger. You think this experience has been formative for Biden? It tremendously shaped him. One thing I’m trying to get across in my book is that stuttering is not about the mechanics of talking. It’s about the thousand other things that accompany that truth. When you stutter, you may be afraid to pick up the telephone or go out and order off the menu at a restaurant, or to ask someone out for a date or to apply for a job because you’re so nervous about the interview. It has profound impacts on so many aspects of your life. Especially growing up as a kid when you’re more vulnerable. So I believe it shapes all of us who stutter deeply from childhood well into adulthood. I am sure he feels deeply connected to his 8-year-old self.
| 
