Having passed 85, Konrad Adenauer caught a bad cold and was told he would have to suffer a few days before he would get better, a reply that frustrated the legendary builder of West Germany, especially after his doctor said, “I am not a magician, I can’t make you young again.”
Adenauer, who served as chancellor until after his 87th birthday, retorted, “I didn’t ask you to make me younger, only to let me continue getting older.”
In essence, this is what President Joe Biden is now asking America, a request America must sadly reject, even though the request does not defy biology, as Adenauer showed.
The anti-Nazi mayor of Cologne, who was fired from his job, evicted from his home, and robbed of his bank account before spending the war years in and out of jail, was close to 70 when the Americans retrieved him from his city’s ruins and restored him as its mayor.
By the time West Germany was formed and he became its leader, Adenauer was 73. It didn’t matter. Sharp as a knife until his retirement 14 years later, he emerged as one of the most effective, original, and visionary leaders to have ever emerged in any land at any time.
Adenauer led his country to an astonishing economic, diplomatic, and moral rehabilitation, crafting a rapprochement with the Jewish people, creating alliances with America, Britain, and France, and laying the foundations of what would later be the European Union.
Adenauer was not alone. William Gladstone began his fourth term as Britain’s prime minister at age 82, functioned soundly, and is recalled as one of his country’s great leaders, an engine and emblem of the stability, prosperity, and sway Britain achieved during Queen Victoria’s reign.
There were, to be sure, entirely different encounters between power and age.
German president Paul von Hindenburg was 86, and one year from his death, when he let Hitler crush democracy, first by agreeing to dissolve the Reichstag, then by granting his government emergency powers – fateful concessions which a younger Hindenburg might have avoided.
Other aging leaders’ performances were less cataclysmic but still problematic. Winston Churchill’s last stint, which he began at age 77 and ended at 81, was marred by illness and fatigue, underscored by a stroke that was kept secret and left him partially paralyzed.
Charles de Gaulle won his last election at age 75, reflecting the popularity of the leader who restored a defeated France’s honor, ended its foreign wars, and ushered in an era of stability and wealth.
Older age leads to disconnect and a generational gap
However, as he approached 80, he lost touch with the younger generation, a gap that culminated in his mishandling of the 1968 riots, his misjudged call for a referendum he lost, and his consequent resignation.
This was besides an idiotic bravado from a Canadian balcony that his hosts saw as a call for rebellion, and reason to expel him from their land.
David Ben-Gurion was 75 when he won his last election and soon became embroiled in personal squabbles that resulted in his resignation, and stained an illustrious biography with years of recrimination, pettiness, and bad blood.
What, then, does all this mean about 81-year-old Joe Biden as talk of his decline makes way for demands that he clear the stage?
THE FIRST thing that can be said already is that whatever the future of his presidency, Biden will never be a Gladstone or an Adenauer. His prime is behind him.
Tragically, when he was at his prime, in 2008, the Democratic Party reversed its ticket.
History, and Biden’s biography, would have been very different if he had been the candidate then, at 67, and the inexperienced, naive and smug Barack Obama had been his vice president.
Biden would have been perfect then because of his long decades on Capitol Hill, his diplomatic expertise, legal training, working-class origins, and the personal tragedies he endured, losing a wife and child in an accident, and another child to disease.
Alas, Biden became president much later, and age caught up with him. That might have passed, the way it did for a while in Churchill’s last term, and the way it did with Woodrow Wilson who – though only 63 at the time – suffered a severe stroke that made his wife, Ellen, effectively run America for the last 18 months of his presidency.
That could happen in 1919, when the US emerged from World War I as a rising superpower, and American society felt strong, unified, and confident. That is not the America that now awaits Biden’s decision whether to run or resign.
MANY PENS will be broken in the future over the question of Biden’s actual condition. If it was good, why did people think it wasn’t? And if it was bad, why did those who knew his situation not make Biden step down?
But that will be in the future. Right now, the problem is not what Biden’s condition is, but what people think it is; and not what will happen if he wins, but what will happen if he doesn’t.
Evidently, millions of voters think Biden has become ineligible. Equally evidently, by insisting on running, Biden is potentially enabling Donald Trump’s grand return.
That is a price that Biden, America, the free world, and all mankind cannot afford.
Trump’s return would constitute a fatal blow to every element of progress that the United States espoused, cultivated, and embodied: fair play, the pursuit of truth, the defense of justice, and the rule of law.
And if that fatal blow arrives, Biden’s attempt to defy age will be equated not with Adenauer’s treatment of national devastation but with Hindenburg’s failure to block its approach.
www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.