Biden’s closest advisers were in ‘denial’ about his decline, ‘Uncharted’ author says

Transcript:

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I am Terry Gross. Democrats are still asking questions like, why didn’t Joe Biden end his reelection campaign sooner? Why did he even run for reelection, knowing that he would have been 82 when he started his second term and 86 when it ended? Why didn’t his staff tell him he wasn’t up to the job? How did Kamala Harris lose to Trump after Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and was convicted of 34 felonies?

My guest, Chris Whipple, explores these questions from different perspectives in his new book, “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, And The Odds In The Wildest Campaign In History.” Whipple’s previous book was about the first two years of the Biden presidency. He’s also the author of “The Spy Masters: How The CIA Directors Shape History And The Future,” and “The Gatekeepers: How The White House Chiefs Of Staff Define Every Presidency.”

Biden’s chief of staff during the first two years of his presidency, Ron Klain, was a major source for the new book about the 2024 election, as was Biden’s final chief of staff, Jeff Zients. Chris Whipple is also a documentary filmmaker and has won a Peabody and an Emmy. Chris Whipple, welcome to FRESH AIR.

CHRIS WHIPPLE: Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

GROSS: So you write, the truth was that Joe Biden was too old to run for reelection, much less govern effectively in a second term. His advisers knew this or should have known it but refused to face that fact. None ever discussed with the president whether he was too old to serve a second term. Instead, they walled Biden off from the outside world, limiting the number of people who interacted with him. How do you know for sure that no one ever discussed with Biden whether he was too old to serve?

WHIPPLE: Well, you know, this is what makes the book such an extraordinary story, I think. It’s really remarkable the extent to which Biden’s inner circle, not just his family but his close advisers, were operating in a kind of fog of delusion and denial. I – you know, I differ with people who say that this was a cover-up in the classic Watergate sense of the word, and that suggests that you’re hiding something that you know to be true. What’s so remarkable about this story is that Biden’s closest advisers really were all in on this delusional notion that he could – that Joe Biden could function effectively for another four years as president at the age of 82 or 86 by the end of that term. And I find it just a really remarkable story.

To answer your specific question, you know, at one point, Bill Daley, President Obama’s second White House chief of staff, spoke to Tom Donilon, who is the brother of maybe Joe Biden’s closest adviser, Mike Donilon, his alter ego. And he said, you know – Daley said, how the hell is this going on? He used a more colorful adjective. And Tom Donilon said, you know, not even my brother has had this conversation about Joe – with Joe Biden about his age. And you can be sure that if Mike Donilon didn’t have that conversation, it’s almost certain no one else did.

GROSS: What are some of the ways in which you say he was walled off from the outside world and his staff limited the number of people who interacted with him?

WHIPPLE: Well, you know, I had my own reasons for wondering if the Biden White House staff was hiding the president because when I was writing my book on the first two years of the administration, I asked for an interview with the president. I was told I could email questions and I would get written answers in reply. You know, clearly, they were uncomfortable even then with the prospect of the president having an interview in real time with a reporter.

GROSS: A major source for your new book was Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff during his first two years in the White House. And, you know, in your book about chiefs of staff, you say that one of the main jobs of a chief of staff, a good chief of staff, is to tell the president what the president doesn’t want to hear, but is true. And you think that Ron Klain was a terrific chief of staff. At the same time, Ron Klain never acknowledged that Biden should, you know, shouldn’t be running. And he saw up close what Biden’s condition was. So how do you explain that?

WHIPPLE: Well, here’s the thing. As I say, I think that this is much more interesting and not nearly as simple as the notion of a cover-up. In other words, I am convinced that Joe Biden’s inner circle was convinced that Joe Biden was capable of governing, and they believed that he could do it for another four years. And we can’t dismiss the fact that Biden on the very last day, July 21, that Sunday when his aides came to hammer out his abdication statement. Joe Biden was on the phone parsing the details of a complex multination prisoner swap. He was on top of every detail.

People who visited Biden in the Oval Office to talk about the Middle East said he was on top of every nuance of Middle Eastern policy. This is not – this was not Woodrow Wilson. This was not somebody over in the corner who was incapacitated while, you know, all the president’s men ran the government. Joe Biden, behind closed doors, was governing capably, whether you liked his policies or not. So there’s no question that he was a shadow of the campaigner that he once was, and that was true from 2020 all the way to the end. But you can’t dismiss the fact – it’s an inconvenient fact for people who say it was a cover-up – that Biden was capable.

GROSS: So on the one hand, like, you say that you don’t think there was a cover-up, but at the same time, you also say that there was a conscious campaign to limit his exposure to the outside world, including, you know, people one on one. So is that a form of cover-up, limiting his exposure so that people wouldn’t see the shape that he was?

WHIPPLE: What I’m saying is the inner circle – and I spent a lot of time talking to his closest aides, and I’m talking about Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed and others. And four months after that debate, I went to the White House, and I interviewed Ricchetti and Reed, and they were still in this – trapped in this kind of force field of denial. They still believed that Biden would have been reelected, could have been reelected, would have governed capably for another four years until he was 86. Now, I find that to be misguided and delusional, but they believe it. And Mike Donilon went to the Harvard Kennedy School months after the election and said he thought the party had lost its mind by walking away from the guy who got 81 million votes in 2020. So all I’m saying is that those guys weren’t covering up somebody that they thought was incapable of governing. They believed he was still on his game.

GROSS: The days leading up to that disastrous debate with Trump did not find Biden in good shape, and Ron Klain saw it up close. What were some of the most disturbing signs that he saw that he told you about?

WHIPPLE: He was in a terrible state. He was absolutely exhausted. He was unable really to follow what was happening in the campaign. He was tuned out. He was obsessed with NATO and with foreign policy, particularly with Emmanuel Macron of France and Olaf Scholz of Germany kept talking about how they said he was doing such a great job. Klain wondered, half jokingly, if Biden thought he was president of NATO and not president of the U.S. He didn’t really have anything to say about his second-term plans. And early on, he walked out of a session in the Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, went over to the pool, sank into a lounge chair and just fell sound asleep.

GROSS: There were two mock debates that were scheduled, and Klain ended one prematurely because Biden just didn’t seem to be up for it. And Biden ended one after about 15 minutes because he was so exhausted. The campaign was considering canceling the debate but decided not to. Why not?

WHIPPLE: Well, I don’t know if the campaign ever formally considered canceling the debate. I said to Ron, given the condition of the president that he described, I said, did you think about, wait a minute, we should put this off? And Klain said, no, it – look, it just wasn’t politically feasible to do that given the sensitivity, given the fact that his cognitive condition was such a huge issue. They had to go forward. They couldn’t – they had no choice, in Klain’s view. But as you said, and as I report in the book, Biden was – Klain was trying every trick in the book to bring the president up to speed. He got him on the phone with Melinda French Gates, who loves to talk about child care, try – hoping that that might kindle some interest in talking about his second-term plans for that. And it worked for a minute, but then Biden lost interest. So it was – it was not a pretty picture, that Camp David preparation.

GROSS: Maybe this shouldn’t have surprised me, but I didn’t know that this kind of thing happens. Spielberg and producer Jeffrey Katzenberg both prepped Biden for the debate. Is that a typical thing, where, like, mega-Hollywood directors and producers prepare candidates before debate?

WHIPPLE: It was a typical thing for Joe Biden, and it was almost like producing a Hollywood movie literally because Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg were on a Zoom call with him before he went to Camp David, advising him on how to answer questions. And Katzenberg in particular specialized in body language. Katzenberg was there during the whole week at Camp David prior to the debate, again, trying to help Biden look more authoritative with his movements on camera.

And Bruce Reid, the deputy chief of staff, was really impressed by how Spielberg was able to coach Biden for the State of the Union speech, the one that everybody concedes he hit out of the park when the – he was heckled by the MAGA Congresspeople, and he really owned them in the moment. So it’s unusual but not for Biden.

GROSS: How was the final decision made to drop out of the race?

WHIPPLE: So Joe Biden is at Rehoboth Beach with only his closest aides. He’s there with Jill Biden and with Annie Tomasini, deputy White House chief, and with Anthony Bernal, the first lady’s senior advisor – other than that, just secret service. Sunday morning, his closest aides – Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon – come over and they sit down with him, and they have this pivotal talk.

And they walk him through. They talk about the polls. They talk about the party. Ricchetti says to Joe Biden that, look, there’s a path for you, but it’s a brutal path. It’s a lonely path, and it’s a real fight. There’s a narrow path that you can walk to victory in the swing states. You can do it, but the party leaders are against you. It’s going to be divisive, and it’s going to be a real battle. But Ricchetti was nevertheless, all in, if he was ready to go there, if he wanted to run for reelection.

And again, I find this kind of extraordinary because, you know, the reality was, the truth was, that there really was no path in the battleground states by that time. And the party leaders, of course, were arrayed against against him. And I think what was decisive was that all three of them – Ricchetti, Donilon and Joe Biden, obviously most important of all – they realized that the party leadership would come down on him like a ton of bricks come Monday, that if he didn’t make that decision, in all likelihood, the party leaders would go publicly against him, and there was really no way out.

GROSS: Let’s take a short break here, and then we’ll talk some more. If you’re just joining us, my guest is journalist Chris Whipple, author of the new book “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, And The Odds In The Wildest Campaign In History.” We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to my interview with Chris Whipple, author of the new book “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, And The Odds In The Wildest Campaign In History.” The Biden team was really angry with Obama. How come?

WHIPPLE: You know, the whole relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama is so complex and fascinating and with so many levels to it. I mean, on the one hand, there’s no question about the fact that they really they really bonded over Beau Biden’s tragic death. And Barack Obama took Joe Biden under his wing, and they developed a closeness there. But at the same time, you know, there’s a real competitiveness between them. And the Obama camp, for example, was not amused when Biden’s staffers were going around early in his first term and talking about how the American Rescue Plan was so much bigger than Obama’s stimulus package back in They’re just competitive, these two camps. And the other major factor here is that Joe Biden never forgave Barack Obama or putting his thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton to become the nominee in 2016. That was a really deep wound for Joe Biden. And in the end, it became clear that during that fateful weekend of July 2021 that Barack Obama wasn’t really there. He just wasn’t there for Joe Biden.

One of Biden’s closest friends told me that the thing that really got him was that Obama never picked up the phone and called him and just said, you know, Joe, jeez, are you sure you’re up to this? That never happened. There was a phone call earlier after the debate saying, hey, you know, it was just a bad night – don’t worry about it. But when things went south and Biden was on the ropes, Barack Obama never picked up the phone.

GROSS: It sounds to me from your book that when Biden dropped out, the Harris campaign was kind of prepared for that. The Harris campaign was waging what you describe as a stealth campaign to try to be prepared in case Biden did drop out. Tell us about that stealth campaign.

WHIPPLE: Yeah, you know, this is really previously unreported. But what I learned in writing the book was that prior to that weekend when Biden made his decision, you know, up to that point, Harris had to be absolutely scrupulous. You know, she was walking through a minefield. I mean, she had to be so careful not to give any hint that she was thinking about taking over the top spot on the ticket. But the truth was that she was quietly and secretly preparing. Her camp had reached out to democratic political operatives who were looking at the rules and getting ready and making sure that when that day came, I think they thought, that she would be ready to go. And sure enough, she was. But not only were those operatives looking at the rules and figuring out how she could grasp the nomination, they were also putting out the word to some senators that they needed to come out in favor of Joe Biden stepping aside.

GROSS: What are some of the suggestions you heard about how she could have differentiated herself more and become more of a change agent in the eyes of the public?

WHIPPLE: Well, the No. 1 thing was that she had to be prepared for the $64,000 question, which they knew was coming. And that was, what would you do differently from Joe Biden? And when that day came, when Kamala Harris was appearing on the ABC program “The View,” it was a disaster. She fumbled the answer. She was asked that very question, which she was prepared for. And inexplicably, she said, well, I can’t think of a single thing, was how she began the answer.

That was immediately turned into a campaign commercial by the Trump team, which was devastating. And that was a real turning point of the campaign. She wasn’t prepared for that question – she was prepared, but she couldn’t answer the question. And I think the reason is that fundamentally, Kamala Harris was loyal to Joe Biden. That’s what her campaign staffers told me, that they told her. They’d had several meetings, one of them in which David Plouffe had said, you have to separate yourself, and you have to rip this Band-Aid off. She couldn’t do it.

One of the ironies here is that her top campaign officials, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Lorraine Voles, had gone to the White House and specifically sat down with Jeff Zients, Joe Biden’s chief of staff, and in effect asked for permission to separate themselves from Biden. And Zients told them go for it, you know, do whatever you have to do. Not only that, Joe Biden personally called Kamala Harris and said, look, I get it. You know, you need to win this campaign, and don’t worry about hurting my feelings, in effect – not in those words. So it’s fascinating to me that even then, she was unable to make that break.

GROSS: Well, we need to take another break here, so let me reintroduce you. If you’re just joining us, my guest is Chris Whipple. He’s author of the new book “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, And The Odds In The Wildest Campaign In History.” We’ll be right back after a short break. I’m Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Let’s get back to the interview I recorded on Friday with Chris Whipple, author of the new book “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, And The Odds In The Wildest Campaign In History.” He’s also author of the book “The Gatekeepers” about White House chiefs of staff and the book “The Spymasters” about heads of the CIA.

You think – or a lot of people told you that – you know, your sources – that part of the problem with the Harris campaign was the decision to really focus on the threat to democracy, as opposed to focusing more on, like, personal finance issues and, you know, economic issues. The threat to democracy, that really resonated with a lot of people. But talk a little bit more about the controversy about how much to stress that in the campaign.

WHIPPLE: I think what happened was that the campaign took a page from the 2022 midterms. And you may recall that during those midterms, the Democrats really leaned heavily on democracy and women’s reproductive rights and defied the odds and did so much better than anyone thought they would do during those midterms. So I think the campaign took a page from that, not realizing that they’re very different animals. Midterms are different from presidential elections. Those issues didn’t have the same resonance in the presidential election, which is really all about the two candidates more than it is about issues, no matter how effective or resonant they might’ve been in the midterms.

So I think a number of former presidential campaign managers I spoke to just felt that that was the wrong emphasis, that the real message had to be the economy, had to be bringing down costs, had to be trying to become a change candidate in an election where there was just a tidal wave of anti-incumbent sentiment. You know, around the world, something like 50 out of 85 elections, in those elections, incumbents lost since 2020. So there was a real wave of anti-incumbent sentiment, and she never got out ahead of that.

GROSS: The Harris campaign was criticized for running a really good, more traditional campaign, knocking on doors to get out the vote, going on mainstream media. Whereas the Trump campaign did a lot, like, podcasts, including with people on the right, went on Joe Rogan. And Harris considered going on Joe Rogan’s podcast but decided not to. How consequential do you think the decision was to take a more, like, mainstream approach to getting out the vote and being on the media compared to Trump?

WHIPPLE: Well, I think there’s no question that Trump tapped into a very powerful network of alternative media, and Harris did not. And, of course, missing the Rogan interview was part of that. When I spoke to Susie Wiles, who, by the way, is just an absolutely fascinating character in my view…

GROSS: And Susie Wiles ran Trump’s successful 2024 campaign and is now his chief of staff.

WHIPPLE: That’s correct. Her story is really not well known. But Susie Wiles was emphatic and candid about what she thought the mistakes were by the Harris campaign. And she said she never had any doubt whatsoever that the Trump campaign would win. She said – and again, not mincing words – she said, we couldn’t believe how bad she was, referring to Kamala Harris. And part of what she meant by that was that she felt that, just like Biden’s handlers in 2020, that they were hiding her, not in the basement this time, but they were hiding her coming out of the convention – that there was a period of a couple of weeks where she wasn’t doing interviews. Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ campaign chair, would dispute that. But Susie Wiles was just really emphatic about the fact that they just couldn’t believe how ineffective Harris was and never doubted they were going to win.

GROSS: I want to talk with you about Susie Wiles. And Wiles managed Trump’s 2024 successful presidential campaign and is now his White House chief of staff. One of the things you say – and I mentioned this before – about chiefs of staff is that they have to be able to say no to presidents. They have to be able to tell the truth to the president when it’s not something the president wants to hear. They have to be able to contradict the president and set the president on what they perceive to be the right course. How is Susie Wiles doing in that job? And I’m just thinking about the tariffs and letting loose Elon Musk and taking advice from right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer about who to fire from, you know – like, what national security experts to fire.

WHIPPLE: Well, let me start on the plus side when it comes to Susie Wiles. First of all, her relationship with Trump is absolutely fascinating, and she has a certain magic with him. And I think it goes back to the fact that she’s the daughter of Pat Summerall, the famous sportscaster who struggled with alcoholism, and Susie Wiles knows something about handling difficult men. But that’s another story. To talk about now, I think that on the one hand, this is not Trump 1.0. The Trump White House is no longer a battlefield of backstabbers and leakers, and there’s not anything like the drama that happened during Trump’s first term. And that’s largely because of Susie Wiles. She has a kind of magic with Trump that none of her predecessors had.

You remember Reince Priebus and John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney. You know, he went through chiefs of staff at a rapid clip. I think Susie Wiles is going to be there for a while because he trusts her. On the minus side of the ledger, you’re right – the most important part of the White House chief of staff’s job is walking into the Oval Office, closing the door and telling the president what he doesn’t want to hear. Now, you know, I’ve talked to Susie Wiles since she’s been in this job a number of times. She says that she has fought these battles with him. One of them was in the case of the pardoning, doing a blanket pardon of the January 6 insurrectionists I said to her, did it ever occur to you to say to the president, wait a minute, maybe we should take a look at these one by one instead of a sweeping get out of jail free card? And she said, yes, that’s exactly the conversation I had with him. I lost that argument. Well, she’s lost a lot of battles. And so that suggests that, you know, this is going to be a long, rough road for her. And I’ll add one other thing she said, which is particularly timely at the moment. She told me that there were a bunch of, as she put it, tariff zealots running around in the Trump White House. And we have certainly seen the result of that in recent days.

GROSS: Well, let’s take another break here, and then we’ll talk some more. If you’re just joining us, my guest is Chris Whipple, author of the new book “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, And The Odds In The Wildest Campaign In History.” We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to the interview I recorded Friday with Chris Whipple about his new book “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, And The Odds In The Wildest Campaign In History.” One of your earlier books, “The Gatekeepers,” is about White House chiefs of staff. And you describe the chief of staff position as being, you know, one of the most important positions. Why is it so important? Explain what a chief of staff actually does.

WHIPPLE: Well, it really is the second most powerful job in government. And that was my principal takeaway when I wrote the book back in 2017. It’s – he’s critical because every president learns – sometimes the hard way – that you cannot govern effectively without empowering a chief of staff as first among equals to No. 1, execute your agenda, No. 2, be the gatekeeper, who’s the person who gives the president time and space to think. You have to be the keeper of the message, making sure that everybody’s on the same page. You have to be the president’s heat shield. Jack Watson, Jimmy Carter’s last White House chief, calls that – he calls him the javelin catcher, taking the heat for the president.

It’s just an extraordinarily critical job. And again, to circle back to a question you raised earlier, he is – he or she, at the end of the day, is the person who has to be able to tell the president what he doesn’t want to hear. Don Rumsfeld, who was a very good chief of staff for Gerald Ford way back in the day, said, you know, he’s the one person besides the president’s wife who can look him straight in the eye and say, you cannot go down this road. Trust me, it’s a mistake.

GROSS: The position of chief of staff is relatively new. It started under President Eisenhower. Why did he create the position?

WHIPPLE: Well, Eisenhower was smart enough to know that you really need to have a chief of staff to make things work. And he had a guy named Sherman Adams, who was gruff and tough, and they called him the Abominable No-Man. He was the…

GROSS: Oh, ’cause he said no all the time?

WHIPPLE: Yes, exactly. He was the governmental equivalent of an Army chief of staff, which is probably why Ike came up with the position. But anyway, it began with Eisenhower and really what we – what I’ve discovered in writing the book was that, you know, no modern president has really been able to succeed without an empowered White House chief of staff. There would have been, in my view, no Reagan revolution without Jim Baker, and Bill Clinton might well have been a one-term president without Leon Panetta, who really turned his White House around. So it’s a very important job. I mean, Dick Cheney told me that – and Cheney, of course, was Gerald Ford’s second White House chief at the age of 33 or 34, I think. Cheney told me that the White House chief has more power than the vice president. That’s true, except when Cheney was vice president.

GROSS: Yes. What did Leon Panetta do as chief of staff to turn around the Clinton White House?

WHIPPLE: Well, it was fascinating because Bill Clinton came into office thinking he was so smart that he could run the White House by himself. He was hardly the only president to think that. Jimmy Carter thought the same thing and learned the hard way that he can’t. Bill Clinton came in with his kindergarten friend, Mack McLarty, who was very talented and smart but just unable to discipline, you know, the larger-than-life Clinton. Sound familiar?

And what happened was that at about a year and a half into his presidency, he was really dead in the water. Clinton was in real trouble. Remember Travelgate and Whitewater and all kinds of – couldn’t get any traction. And it was largely because Clinton really couldn’t prioritize and focus on what he needed to do. There was a kind of intervention staged by Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. They had their eye on Leon Panetta, the OMB director who was tough and disciplined. They took him to Camp David and virtually locked him in a cabin until he would agree to do it. He wanted to stay on as OMB director. But Leon Panetta came in, and he just turned things around. He was able to tell the president hard truths, and he organized the White House and drove it forward with help from Erskine Bowles, his deputy, and John Podesta. And the rest is history. He went on to be reelected.

GROSS: You wrote a book about Biden’s first two years as president. And now you’ve written a book about the Biden, Harris and Trump campaigns. Have your views on Biden changed from the book about his first two years in the White House to the book about the end of his presidency and the end of his campaign?

WHIPPLE: For sure. I mean, what’s changed, of course, is the unbelievably dramatic ending of the story. I mean, it’s Shakespearean with all of the plot twists and turns and the betrayals and the tragedy, if you want to call it that, which I think it is for Joe Biden and for Kamala Harris. But I think history is going to judge Biden and his inner circle harshly. I think that it’s unquestionable that there was just an abdication of leadership, starting within that inner circle. The inability of any of those guys or women to sit the president down and say, look, you know, you need to look at this clear-eyed and realize that you’re going to be 86 years old and you’re not up to this, and everybody knows it.

That never happened. And again, I think it’s in part because there’s this gravitational pull when you’re in the rarefied air of the Oval Office. In that inner circle, sometimes you just don’t see clearly. But my views have changed because I think that – in this sense. I mean, I think Biden was in some ways a transformational president. I mean, some of the achievements – rallying NATO, pulling the economy out of a free fall, managing the pandemic. In a number of ways, he was transformative. But the story is a sad story and a tragic ending, and I’m afraid it was self-inflicted.

GROSS: Something that surprised me is how much Jill Biden, Biden’s wife, supported his run. Like, I would have thought she would be really concerned about his health and his ability to endure all of the stresses – physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual – of the presidency. It’s, you know, maybe the hardest job in the world. But she seemed to really be supporting his continued campaign. You write that after the disastrous debate, she said to him, like, you did great. You answered all the questions. Well, answering the questions, it’s a pretty low bar after a debate. Do you have any insights into Jill Biden’s continued support of her husband’s campaign?

WHIPPLE: Yeah, that was an extraordinary and telling moment when she back at the hotel, after that disastrous debate, you would think, at least I was thinking as I watched the debate go on, that she would want to take him aside and say, listen, Joe, are you sure you want to go ahead with this? You know, or we need to have a doctor look at you. And, you know, that was, are you OK? I mean, maybe she did have that conversation privately. But publicly, moments after that debate or minutes after it, she was gushing about what a great job he’d done. So it’s extraordinary, and she was, at the end of the day, all about wanting to help Joe Biden do what he wanted to do. So as I said, we can’t know what they said behind closed doors, but she was certainly all in on reelection.

GROSS: Chris Whipple, thank you so much for talking with us.

WHIPPLE: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Terry.

GROSS: Chris Whipple is the author of the new book “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, And The Odds In The Wildest Campaign In History.” This Thursday will mark the hundredth anniversary of “The Great Gatsby’s” publication. After we take a short break, book critic Maureen Corrigan will tell us why she’s one of the many who consider it the great American novel. She wrote a book about “Gatsby.” This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. “The Great Gatsby” was published on April 10, 1925, which makes this Thursday its 100th anniversary. Our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, is one of the many people who think it’s the great American novel. She has an appreciation.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: “The Great Gatsby,” 100 years old – how can that be? To borrow the words F. Scott Fitzgerald used to describe New York City in the 1920s, “The Great Gatsby” possesses all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The novel’s main characters are young in a restless America, reveling in the excess of the new modern age, an age whose anxieties have resurfaced with fresh intensity in our own moment. Great works of art are great in part because they continue to have something to say to the present. They’re both time-bound and timeless. And, boy, does “Gatsby” have something to say to us in 2025.

Recall that the novel takes place in the summer of 1922 on Long Island and in New York City, a city that was then the center for contemporary debates about the threat of foreign influences, so-called racial pollution and the ascendance of the liberated new woman embodied in the novel by the professional golfer Jordan Baker.

Post-World War I New York had been transformed by the colossal second wave of immigrants, mostly from eastern and southern Europe, that had begun pouring into the city in the late 1880s. By 1920, only 1 million of the city’s 6 million residents were white native-born Protestants. There was also a massive internal migration going on back then. Black Americans were relocating from southern rural areas to cities like Chicago, Detroit and New York.

No wonder, then, that Tom Buchanan, that boorish bullying embodiment of white, male, old-money privilege, introduces himself in Chapter 1 of the novel by spouting ideas from a popular book on eugenics that he’s been reading. Civilizations going to pieces, insists Tom. If we don’t look out, the white race will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff. It’s been proved.

In addition to ruminating about how far the promise of America could or should be extended to include immigrants, women and people of color, “The Great Gatsby” is also freshly topical because it’s our great American novel about class. All the other major contenders – and I’m thinking of books like “Huckleberry Finn,” “Moby Dick,” “Beloved” – foreground the issue of race. The compressed geography of Long Island and New York, made mythic in the novel, allowed Fitzgerald to speed his characters through high-class East Egg to wannabe West Egg and past the working class Valley of Ashes to explore the limits of the American dream of social mobility.

Fitzgerald himself said his novel was about aspiration, but aspiration doesn’t guarantee success. Remember that Jay Gatsby, the character who strives, who stretches out his arms to that green light and all it represents, is dead at the beginning of this retrospective story. No surprise, then, that “The Great Gatsby” has been and continues to be banned as our frenzy of book banning rages on. Blame all that drinking, extramarital sex and a lurking doubt about the meritocratic promise of America.

But the banners aren’t reading the novel carefully enough, for even as “The Great Gatsby” tells us the American dream may be a mirage, it does so in some of the most beautiful language anyone has ever written about America, particularly the last seven or so pages of the novel, where Nick Carraway talks about man’s search for something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

F. Scott Fitzgerald would be stunned to know that celebrations of “Gatsby’s” centennial are taking place around the world this year. The novel was largely forgotten at the time of his death in Hollywood in 1940 at the age of 44. Back then, unsold copies of the first edition of “Gatsby” were still gathering dust in Scribner’s warehouse. Fitzgerald would also be stunned to know that “The Great Gatsby,” more than any other novel, is the one most Americans read in high school. Indeed, it may be one of the few things that unites us. At the risk of sounding like a killjoy, I wish everyone would ditch those Roaring ’20s parties and instead celebrate “Gatsby’s” 100th by reading or rereading this matchless novel about the troubled dream of America.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan is the author of a book about Gatsby called “So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures.”

Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, how can one man change the whole global economy? We talk about Trump’s tariffs, why they’ve led stock markets to plummet, how they’re changing our relationship with allies and adversaries, and what tariffs mean for our day-to-day lives. Our guest will be Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist. I hope you’ll join us. To keep up with what’s on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram, @nprfreshair.

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GROSS: Fresh Air’s executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Meyers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I’m Terry Gross.

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