Warm in Public, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton Have Been Intense Rivals in Private

WASHINGTON — As he watched Hillary Rodham Clinton’s relentless march toward the Oval Office over the past several months, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was privately churning.

Meetings with his foreign policy aides veered into lengthy discussions about Mrs. Clinton’s hawkish stance. At dinners with donors, Mr. Biden expressed astonishment at her handling of the controversy over her private email server. Those close to him say the mere mention of her name could make him fume, and he viewed her family’s potent, sometimes punishing political machinery with growing resentment.

The decades-long relationship between Mr. Biden and Mrs. Clinton has included many public expressions of warmth, but in private, it has been marked by an intense rivalry as they both imagined ascending to the highest office in the land. And as the Democratic establishment this summer increasingly fell into line behind Mrs. Clinton as the party’s best chance of winning the presidency, Mr. Biden felt slighted and hurt.

The two had not spoken for months, their last conversation occurring at a breakfast shortly after Mr. Biden’s son Beau died in late May.

“I am sure there has been some tension in the last few weeks,” said the Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen. “He didn’t want to close the door, and she didn’t want the door to open.” But Ms. Rosen added, “Fundamentally, these two agree on so much more than they disagree on.”

During an address in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, in which he said he would not seek the presidency, Mr. Biden never once uttered Mrs. Clinton’s name, and said nothing that could be construed as positive about her. But he said several things that appeared to chastise her. He once again described Republicans as “not our enemies,” a reference to her remark during the Democratic debate last week about the enemy she is the proudest to have.

And he said that Democrats should proudly defend President Obama’s record, after Mrs. Clinton has spent recent months distancing herself from it.

On Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton called Mr. Biden and released a statement praising his “grace in grief, his grit and determination.”

Part of the tension between them grew out of what Mr. Biden saw as his role as the natural successor to carry Mr. Obama’s legacy forward. In discussions with potential supporters as his decision about 2016 drew near, Mr. Biden would often describe himself as the true standard-bearer for the Obama agenda, and he expressed frustration at times with the attention paid to Mrs. Clinton.

And, recently, as his consideration of a presidential candidacy became more public, the Clintons and their allies began to drop hints that they would not shy away from raising issues about his record and putting obstacles in his path. At a recent New Hampshire dinner, Mrs. Clinton linked Mr. Biden to a bankruptcy bill he had voted for in the Senate that is deeply unpopular among the Democratic Party’s liberal base.

For weeks leading up to his announcement on Wednesday, Mr. Biden also repeatedly told advisers and potential campaign staff members that he did not believe Mrs. Clinton could defeat the Republican candidate. He watched as she played up her relationship with Mr. Obama, especially when speaking to black crowds in South Carolina and elsewhere, and argued that if anyone should take advantage of the sitting president’s record and high approval rating among Democratic primary voters, it should be him.

The vice president viewed Mrs. Clinton as “this book-smart student who succeeded by dint of grunt work but not by dazzling brilliance,” saw himself as the more “intuitive politician and the intuitive leader and policy maker,” said one Democrat who has spoken to people advising Mr. Biden.

In the last 48 hours, Mr. Biden wore his growing frustration on his sleeve, offering a thinly veiled warning to Mrs. Clinton that Democrats would be “making a tragic mistake if we walk away or attempt to undo the Obama legacy.” In recent days, Mrs. Clinton has announced her opposition to the president’s trade deal with Asia, among other policies.

As colleagues in the Senate, Mr. Biden and Mrs. Clinton were friendly. He was one of the first people Mrs. Clinton met with after her concession speech when she dropped out of the 2008 primary. After Mr. Obama made his vice-presidential choice known, Mr. Biden told a crowd in Nashua, N.H., that Mrs. Clinton “is as qualified or more qualified than I am.” He added, “And, quite frankly, she may have been a better pick than me.”

But Mrs. Clinton’s outsize celebrity as secretary of state began to grate on Mr. Biden. With the news media noting Mrs. Clinton’s heavy travel schedule, aides to Mr. Biden often said that while miles traveled were irrelevant, the vice president had traveled nearly 700,000 miles in his first term, compared with Mrs. Clinton’s 956,733 miles.

“They always had a very correct relationship, a respectful relationship, but not a warm relationship,” said Bill Richardson, who briefly battled Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2008. He recalled watching the two of them circle each other warily before debates that year: “Yeah, we’re friends. But we’re watching-over-our-shoulder friends.”

In public remarks on Tuesday, Mr. Biden noted the 1.1 million miles he had traveled — more than Mrs. Clinton. And he said that, unlike a secretary of state, when he speaks with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia or other world leaders, “they know that I’m speaking for the president.”

Mr. Biden’s resentment about Mrs. Clinton has ebbed and flowed. In 2011, pollsters working for Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign asked voters in battleground states a question: Would you be more likely to vote for Mr. Obama if Mrs. Clinton were to campaign for him? The poll intensified speculation that Mr. Obama was considering replacing Mr. Biden with Mrs. Clinton on the ticket, angering the vice president.

The next year, Mr. Obama, aware of how sensitive his vice president was when it came to Mrs. Clinton, edited out a joke about dropping Mr. Biden from the ticket from a draft of his speech for the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner.

With Mrs. Clinton tucked away from politics and above the fray at the State Department in 2012, Mr. Biden barnstormed the country to sell the Obama presidency, sometimes at the expense of his own approval ratings. But shortly after she left the State Department the next year, presidential speculation began to surround Mrs. Clinton again.

Several Democrats said Wednesday that they hoped any bitter feelings about the rivalry could be put aside, and the party could move forward.

“It just settles an issue that, while it was outstanding and ambiguous, created a cloud of uncertainty,” said Alan Patricof, a venture capitalist who is a donor to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. “I think now that it is clarified, it makes everything that much more clear.”