Joe Biden

Joe Biden in GQ on Being President in 2016: You can't be a compassionate man, a guy without a mean bone in his body, and also a brilliant man. The public doesn't have room for that—at least not in Joe Biden. He mentions a famous world leader. He won't say who, but it could have been any number of leaders from any number of countries across the globe—Karzai, Medvedev, Netanyahu—a moment, one of a million moments in a political career spanning four decades. "We were trying to get a world leader to refrain from doing something. He came to Washington, and it was a big deal. Most people thought that if he had done what he was going to do, it would have caused a war to break out." Send in Joe Biden. Arm around the world leader. Talk to the world leader. Soft voice, a few easy laughs, show some Joe Biden empathy to the world leader. "And I convinced him to forgo it and do something else," he says. No big deal. It's what he does. Save a country or two from some miserable war. To the extent that all politics is personal, Joe Biden is the historic monument. "And I walked out, and a guy was there, a senior staff guy at the State Department, and he said, 'You know, Mr. Vice President, you didn't realize it, but that was diplomacy!'"