As Joe Biden lay in his hospital bed about to be put under for the risky operation to fix a potentially fatal brain aneurysm, he grabbed the neurosurgeon’s arm.
“He looked me in the eye and he said, Doc, do a good job because some day I’m going to be president,” recalled Neal Kassell, one of two surgeons who performed the operation in May 1988.
Biden was not joking. This brush with his own mortality shortly after the failure of his first run for the White House only cemented the sense of destiny he felt from at least his early 20s, when he told his first wife’s bemused parents that he aimed to be a senator and then go on to the presidency.
This iron-clad