Hunter Biden told ex-wife Kathleen 'politics was now an option' while returning from brother Beau's funeral
In his newly released memoir, President Joe Biden's son Hunter opened up about his hopes of running for office and its origin in his brother Beau's funeral. A kind of mourning for Beau, who died at 46 after a battle with cancer, Hunter's memoir 'Beautiful Things' recounts him making the proclamation to his then-wife Kathleen while the two returned from the funeral.
"I pulled the car over and told Kathleen that maybe politics was now an option for me," Hunter writes in his book, before adding what led to him realizing a sense of purpose in politics following Beau's death. "'You know, as horrible as I feel, I have a feeling of real purpose', I said. It seemed so many people were more willing to forgive my past mistakes — relapses with drinking, administrative discharge from the Navy Reserve — than I was willing to forgive myself. I suppose her response — Are you serious? — was entirely warranted. We didn’t say another word to each other for the rest of the ride. Or, really, ever again."
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Idolizing his deceased brother throughout the memoir that released onTuesday, April 6, Hunter gushes about him, “He had the longest eyelashes to go with those striking blue eyes. He had great hair." In his own memoir, POTUS and father of the two, Joe Biden had noted: “I was pretty sure Beau could run for President someday, and, with his brother’s help, he could win.” But Hunter's memoir shows how he slowly took his brother's place in Beau's widow Hallie's life. “By the time we returned to Delaware at the end of the week, we were no longer just two people bound by shared grief. We were a couple,” he writes.
Married after just a week of meeting each other, Hunter had instantly professed his love to Hallie on a blind date, all because of her features that were similar to his brother, he writes. "We both smiled as I sat down. I spoke up first. 'You have the exact same eyes as my brother.' Then, not long after that, having no idea what I was going to say until it jumped out of my mouth: 'I know this probably isn’t a good way to start a first date, but I’m in love with you.'
Hunter, who was married to Kathleen from 2003 to 2017, has been married to Melissa Cohen since 2019. The five-figure-a-month paycheck he gets from a Ukrainian gas company was supposed to take care of Beau's diagnosis, he writes. "I want to be clear: Beau’s health problems didn’t prompt me to do something I wouldn’t have done otherwise. The money was helpful, but I could’ve figured out another way to make it. I wasn’t desperate. Yet it did provide me the ability not to work as hard at continuing to develop clients, the most time-consuming part of my work — drilling twenty dry wells to finally hit pay dirt. That gave me more time to tend to Beau."
The money, however, would eventually end up becoming “a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction” that helped him “spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively,” including using cocaine on a Burisma board trip, wrote the author in his memoir.