View from the East Wing: A Memoir
Dr. Biden’s book reflects an insular White House where loyalty was prized and Mr. Biden’s feelings were prioritized. In her book and in interviews, she has emphasized the pain that has been inflicted on her family ... Now 74, America’s most experienced living political spouse has closed a remarkable and turbulent chapter of her life by telling the reader what she saw, just not necessarily how she felt.
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View from the East Wing is full of blind spots. She doesn’t persuade; she just insists and elides ... Perhaps because so many important things are missing from the book, there is a lot of filler, even though the book isn’t long (two hundred and sixty-six pages, generously spaced). We are provided with a long list of the amenities at Camp David and the texts of various press releases ... There is a lot of Joe in the book, and yet not much of him doing the work of governing—deliberating, balancing the concerns of foreign and domestic allies, making the big calls. The question of who did, and who decided, what in the Biden Administration is not a conundrum that the former First Lady seems ready to help resolve.
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A memoir that is at turns delusional, sappy, resentful and—in a weirdly irresistible way—revelatory of the former first lady’s agitated state of mind ... There is no dearth of blithe banalities ... But there’s anger, too. Her book’s title can be read as a spitball at Donald Trump, who has torn down the East Wing ('may it rest in peace') where Mrs. Biden had her first lady’s office ... It is Mrs. Biden’s mulish unwillingness to face up to the evidence of the president’s obvious cognitive decline in 2024 that is striking.
